by Williamson Murray
May 2009
Vol 14, No 19
Williamson Murray is a senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses. This essay is based on his talk at the FPRI Wachman Center’s History Institute for Teachers on What Students Need to Know About America’s Wars, Part 2: 1920 - Present, held May 2-3, 2009. The Institute was cosponsored and hosted by the Cantigny First Division Foundation at its First Division Museum in Wheaton, IL. See www.fpri.org/education/americaswars2 for videofiles, texts of lectures, and classroom lessons. The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall. Core support is provided by the Annenberg Foundation and Mr. H.F. Lenfest. Additional support for the military history program is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Stuart Family Foundation, and the Cantigny First Division Foundation.
On September 1, 1939, twenty years and three months after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, war broke out again in Europe. It is one of the great conundrums of history that after the catastrophe of World War I, another massive catastrophic war could have happened, one that brought even more destruction to Europe and world civilization than World War I.
One of the many explanations historians have given is that the origins of World War II are directly attributable to the Treaty of Versailles—that Versailles was much too harsh a peace, and that the Germans should have been given an easy peace that brought them into the European community. From my perspective, this is simply wrong.1 Too often historians fail to take into account the context within which events happen. Certainly from our perspective today, a wonderful, easy peace on Germany might have made some difference in preventing World War II. But that misses the context of 1919 and how World War I had broken out. It had been deliberately instigated and caused by the German Reich—perhaps not quite to the extent that World War II (at least in terms of Europe) was caused by Nazi Germany, but German behavior in the first months of the war was extraordinary by any account. This is something historians have begun to notice as we come to understand the profound impact World War I had on world history.
Six thousand civilians—men, women and children—were executed in Belgium and northern France by German troops in August-September 1914. The Germans claimed the civilians were engaged in guerrilla warfare; in fact, historians’ reconstruction of these events indicates that these were friendly-fire incidents or simply retreating troops. It was an extraordinary atrocity, notwithstanding that it has been overwhelmed by later crimes in places like Auschwitz, where the Germans moved from killing thousands to millions. In 1914, the excuse was military necessity as Germany invaded Belgium and Luxembourg, countries with which Germany had signed treaties promising to respect their neutrality. (The German chancellor told the British ambassador in July 1914 that these treaties were just “scraps of paper.”)
In addition to the Germans’ criminal treatment of Belgian and French civilians in German-occupied areas, Operation Albrecht in winter 1916-17, as the Germans retreated, devastated approximately 10,000 square miles of French territory. Every single tree was cut down, every well was poisoned, the entire population was removed, and all the bridges and infrastructure were ruined. As late as October-November 1918, German troops retreating from the French territories were poisoning the landscape, flooding coalmines, and destroying factories.
The way World War I ended gave the peacemakers at Versailles an impossible problem. First, no Allied troops were on German territory when the war ended. Consequently, Germans across the political spectrum almost immediately claimed that their army had stood unbroken and unbeaten in the field. But German records and the testimony of German officers before the Reichstag in 1924 prove that this is false. Some German divisions were down to 200 men, companies were down to as few as 10-20 men, and platoons no longer existed. There were 700,000 deserters by fall 1918. The German Army had been defeated and crushed, but the Germans simply hid that reality. They pretended that they had accepted the armistice because they believed doing so would aid Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points campaign. The result, within a year or two of the armistice, was a sense of deep wrong on the part of the German people that had virtually no justification.
Of course, there was no possibility of an easy peace, nor indeed of a harsh peace as in 1945. Versailles fell between two stools. It did not address the fact that Germany was the most powerful country in Europe and (had it not waged World War II) over the next 20-40 years was clearly going to resume its pre-1914 position as a semi-hegemonic power in Europe.
British and French politicians would have been lynched by their populations had they proposed an easy peace. The sacrifices of the French and English people were such that there was no way they were going to allow such an outcome, nor should they have, given German behavior. When General Pershing was told about the armistice in October 1918 and asked what terms the allies should give the Germans, he warned that unless the peace was dictated in Berlin, we risked repeating such a war. He was right.
World War I had a huge, baleful influence on Europe’s entire political spectrum in the 1920s and 1930s. Those years saw the emergence of the Soviet Union, a state that rejected the entire European past—both economic and political and the state system—and believed in world revolution. The second great strategic result of World War I was the appearance of what the Germans called the saison states in Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the Baltic States, Finland) that had been part of the great empires of 1914 (Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany). These new states were incapable of cooperating with each other politically, militarily, or economically. So while Germany had suffered military defeat, its economic and political potential remained and gave it an easy road to dominating Eastern Europe. In 1914 Germany had three great powers on its frontier, which had given it great strategic and military angst. In 1919, it had only one—France, which had been severely damaged psychologically and economically by the results of World War I.
The European powers’ reaction to World War I in the 1920s is extremely important for understanding the context of how Nazi Germany and fascist Italy arose and the events of the late 1930s. There was a sense in Britain when the war was over and the German fleet had been surrendered that Germany was no longer a strategic threat. The conundrum was that economically, prewar Germany had been Britain’s most important trading power. For Britain to regain its economic position in the world, it needed a strong trading partner in Germany.
Moreover, by the late 1920s popular thinking about the war was heavily influenced by a number of stunning literary pieces. Unfortunately, some of the greatest literature of the twentieth century is no longer read in literature courses in universities and high schools because it involves war. Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That (1929), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Guy Chapman’s Passionate Prodigality (1933), Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1930) were brilliant books, great literary triumphs. There was the poetry of Wilfred Owen among others. All of these were deeply antiwar and understandably so, because all of these men had experienced World War I close up. This literature underlines the crushing impact of battles like the Somme and Passchendaele on the British psyche, which had been completely unprepared for that kind of sacrifice and catastrophe. If you have the chance to travel around northern France and any of the battlefields, it’s well worth seeing the great Thiepval memorial to British soldiers, at which there are inscribed 76,000 names of soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. At the Menin Gate there are another 20,000; the list goes on and on.
The attitude in the British polity from the early-mid 1930s through to spring 1939 was that there was no reason why a country should go to war—there was absolutely nothing worth defending. In a world of reasonable men, war could be avoided. The result was a complete ahistoricism and an incapacity to understand the danger that fascist Italy and Nazi Germany represented. That explains a great deal about the British response—in particular, the response of Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister from March 1937 to May 1940. To Chamberlain, all one needed to do to settle differences between the democratic powers of Europe and the dictators was to sit down with them and list one’s desiderata; all matters could be settled peacefully. No matter how disastrous that looks from our perspective, this was the view of nearly the entire British polity at the time. Winston Churchill held a quite different position as he commented in the Daily Mail in summer 1934, when Europeans were going on vacation and deporting themselves as if there were no troubles at all even as Germany was arming. Right from the beginning, Churchill understood and made it clear in his speeches and writings that Nazi Germany represented not only a terrible moral danger but a terrible strategic danger. We know that Churchill was right, but his warnings went unheeded at the time.
The American response to the end of World War I was “Good, we can go back and stick our heads in the sand; what happens in the rest of the world doesn’t matter.” The war was seen as the fault of the merchants of death and the bankers. Combined with that was the kind of irresponsibility that Congress can show at times. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 destroyed the world economy. It turned a major recession into a catastrophic world depression, which had a huge impact across the board in Europe and the Pacific, particularly on the political leaderships of Germany and Japan.
The French recognized that the Germans were going to come back. They feared Germany, dreaded the future, and understood that they could not handle the German problem by themselves. France had to depend on the British, Russians, Poles, and anyone else who would sign up to help them. When help was not forthcoming, the French were incapable of acting on their own.
As to the Germans, right from the beginning, from 1919 on, there was a deep bitterness, not at the Treaty of Versailles—that was the excuse—but at the fact that they had lost the war. The sense was that somehow history had been unjust and the world had ganged up on Germany, that Germany had been completely mistreated. Moreover, there was a very different reaction to World War I that is difficult for us to understand unless we’re willing to read some first-class literature. The greatest twentieth-century novelist in Germany was arguably Ernst Juenger, who wrote probably the best book on World War I, Storm of Steel (1920). It’s a very disquieting book. Juenger served as a front-line combat infantry officer on the Western Front. He was wounded 17 times. He was awarded the pour le Mérite, which was given to very few combat veterans. Juenger thought World War I was wonderful, that every generation should have the opportunity to experience it. He wrote many other novels before he died in 1998 at the age of 102, and his collection of books and other writings is extraordinary. But his great book on World War I was Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, retranslated excellently by Michael Hofmann in 2003). This was not Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), which was as unpopular in Germany as it was popular in Britain, France, and the United States. Storm of Steel represented the German intellectual and literary reaction to World War I. That in itself should tell us a great deal.
There is another important element here having to do with government’s use of history. We now know that beginning in 1919 the German government waged a massive disinformation campaign on the subject of who had caused World War I and how Germany had acted during the course of that war.2 The arguments of the German government persuaded not only the German population but a substantial number of American and British academics in straight-out misuse of the documents and history of the period. The books of historian Sidney Fay, notably The Origins of the World War (1928; rev. 1930) are utter nonsense. The German government got him to write this nonsense by providing him with numerous fellowships to Germany, where they showed him a selected choice of documents which he further distorted.
We also have to understand that while World War I bears a major responsibility for bringing the Nazis to power, the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923—the one case where the French acted decisively on their own—also played a role, as did the Great Depression. By winter 1932-33 some 40 percent of the German working population was jobless. Adolf Hitler came to power by creating an ideology based on race. The Nazis identified the enemy as racial, where the communists and USSR identified the enemy as class. Both of them threw huge numbers of innocent people into categories that allowed their respective states to follow their murderous paths to the future.
I highly recommend the HBO movie “Conspiracy” (2002, Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci), which I’ve shown to my classes at the Naval Academy. It depicts the January 1942 Wannsee Conference in which the leadership of Nazi Germany decided bureaucratically how they were going to solve the problem of there being 6-7 million Jews on the European continent and how they would get rid of them. It is a chilling, frightening meeting.
In addition to an ideology that defined the Jews as the enemy of world civilization, Hitler argued that the Aryans, exemplified by the Germans, were the center of all advances in world civilization. In order to survive, the Aryans were going to have to expand and enslave the populations of Eastern Europe, which began on September 1, 1939. The German actions in the first six months of the occupation of Poland were not aimed at the Jews, but at the mass extermination of Polish professors, religious leaders, and intellectuals. Jews were crowded into concentration camps. The Nazi aim was to enslave Europe from the Urals to the Bay of Biscay.
After Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, Nazi Germany undertook a massive rearmament. Four days after he took power, Hitler met with his senior generals and made clear that he was willing to give them a blank check to rebuild Germany’s military into the most powerful instrument in Europe. He also made clear that it was going to be used not to restore Germany to the position that it held in 1914, but to overturn the European state system as it had existed since the seventeenth-century Treaty of Westphalia.
The world now entered into the truly depressing period of the 1930s. In 1933 Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations; in 1935 he began rearmament and conscription and announced the formation of the Luftwaffe. In 1936 the Germans remilitarized the Rhineland, from which the French had withdrawn in 1931, well before the Treaty of Versailles had said they had to. There were of course other signposts along the way to the destabilization of Europe. There’s a tendency to look at this period as if there was a linear set of events. Yes, there was the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, in 1936 the Spanish Civil War. But those were peripheral events. In fact, Hitler had a meeting in 1937 where a number of his followers argued for giving additional aid to Franco in order to end the Spanish Civil War. Hitler disagreed, arguing that that war was a wonderful smokescreen as German rearmament proceeded on its course.
In 1938, the chickens came home to roost. Chamberlain’s government made a major effort throughout the year to appease Germany at almost any cost. The result was the occupation of Austria in March 1938, which was greeted by the Austrians with huge enthusiasm, notwithstanding the continuing Austrian claim that they were the first country to be raped by the Nazis. That was followed in summer 1938 by the Czech crisis, in which the Germans demanded that the Sudeten Germans be brought back into Germany, of which they’d never been a part. A crisis was manipulated by Hitler with the aim of causing a European war. Hitler never believed that the British and French were going to enter the conflict. He believed he could get away with an invasion of Czechoslovakia and wanted to try out his new military. In retrospect, it would have been a disaster for the Germans. We’d be talking right now about a small war that had occurred in 1938-40 and Germany’s defeat. But Chamberlain set in motion a set of events that eventually resulted in the Munich agreement of late September 1938 and the destruction of Czechoslovakia.3 Chamberlain believed in sitting down with the dictators and getting them to agree to a reasonable settlement, but of course the settlement was not reasonable. It destroyed Czechoslovakia’s independence and chance to defend itself and turned over to the Germans not only the Sudeten Germans but within six months the rest of Czechoslovakia, which the Germans occupied in March 1939.
The British missed the entire strategic framework within which the crisis was taking place. The Czech divisions were a key component of France’s capacity to defend itself in 1938, and the Czech army would have been in 1939. When it was all over, Chamberlain returned to Great Britain to huge acclamations and popularity. On October 5, Winston Churchill gave what may be the greatest speech of his entire career to a House of Commons that booed him and was outraged by what he said:
“All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness. She has suffered in every respect by her association with France, under whose guidance and policy she has been actuated for so long…. Every position has been undermined and abandoned on specious and plausible excuses.
I do not grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost, who never flinched under the strain of last week, the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment; but they should know the truth…. They should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged and that the terrible words have for the time been spoken against the Western Democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is the end. This is the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup.”
How right he was. Occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 turned around the European situation to the point that the Chamberlain government confronted a storm of outrage in the country. Accordingly, within two weeks of the German occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, Britain extended guarantees to Poland and virtually every country in Eastern Europe, none of which it could actually honor militarily, because the Chamberlain government had not rearmed Britain seriously.
Hitler’s response to this probably would have happened anyway. He ordered the German high command to prepare German forces for an invasion of Poland to take place on September 1, 1939. The German forces were ready, and the invasion took place.
Chamberlain was not preparing the allies for war, but attempting diplomatically to deter Germany from going to war. That’s why the guarantees were given, why the support for the French was now forthcoming both militarily and politically, and why the British were so willing and enthusiastic about reestablishing the connections they had had with France in World War I.
The great question mark in summer 1939 was what the Soviet Union would do. Most of the liberals expected that it would sign up for a great antifascist crusade. We now understand that this was not a liberal democratic regime but a regime of enormous evil. What Stalin understood in March 1939 when the guarantees began to occur was that he had two choices: dealing with the Germans or the Western powers. It took the Germans until June 1939 to wake up to the reality that if the Soviet Union struck a deal with Germany, it could avoid a war, sit back and watch the capitalist powers (according to Soviet ideology) destroy themselves and then come in and pick up the pieces when the war had severely damaged both the Germans and the Western powers. Or it could join the Western powers, defend Eastern Europe, the governments it did not like, and confront a war in the immediate future. It’s easy to see what direction Stalin was going to go in. The result was the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, or Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of August 1939. Stalin and his advisors believed this would minimize the German danger. Again, according to the country’s Marxist ideology, Hitler was the puppet of the capitalists. But Germans would follow him much more enthusiastically than the Russian, Ukrainian, and other populations were going to follow Stalin. The Soviet regime had grossly misread the Nazis’ power and intentions.
The signing of the August 1939 pact sealed the fate of Poland, which was now in an impossible situation. Again, one of the great tragedies of World War II is the fate of Poland. Nearly 2 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) died in the war. One of the most moving memorials in Normandy is to the Polish armored division, which fought through to Falaise in August 1944. They knew their country was going to go down the drain, that it would be occupied by the Soviet Union. They had few illusions.
The attitude of the Soviets themselves is best summed up by three remarks. The first is a toast Stalin made at the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He toasted “Heinrich Himmler, the man who has brought order to Germany.” The second came in June 1940, in which Molotov congratulated the German ambassador on the spectacular and wonderful victory of the German Army over the French and the British. The third remark occurred on June 22, 1941, when Molotov commented to the German ambassador “What have we done to deserve this?” He was right. The one agreement the Soviet Union lived up to faithfully from beginning to end was the Nonaggression Pact, and the results for the Russian and Ukrainian populations would be 27 million dead by the time the war was over.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Our massacred peasants
HINDSIGHT By F Sionil Jose Updated June 29, 2009 12:00 AM
The murder the other week of Rene Peñas, who led the Sumilao farmers in their march from Bukidnon to Manila, and the violent eviction of the demonstrators from the premises of Congress at about the same time, evoked painful memories of peasant travail in the past. Rene Peñas was certainly not the first farm leader to die at the hands of those who oppose agrarian reform. And those demonstrators in Congress belong to a devoted lineage of farmers who tried — and failed — to redress their sorry lot. Sure, the comprehensive agrarian reform program has been extended but so much has yet to be done, particularly in the coconut and sugar lands.
We are an agricultural country that should be able to produce enough food for ourselves, but this government, dominated as it has always been by landlords, has long ignored the peasantry. In a sense, its hierarchs have never grasped the profound nationalist and religious roots of the aspirations of our very poor as well as their rigid compulsion to revolt.
Let us start with the Colorums of Tayug, Pangasinan in 1931. My first informant on that mini-rebellion was the late Narciso Ramos, father of President Fidel V. Ramos. He was then a journalist in Asingan near Tayug, just like Rosales where I was born. He had written about the uprising, knew its origins in landlord oppression for in Asingan, as in Rosales, were believers of the faith.
Colorum is not the official name of that peasant group. The word is from the Latin mass, and they believed in quasi-religious chants and anting-anting (charms), which supposedly endowed them with superpowers. Soon after the word came to mean illegal objects like colorum jeepneys, colorum firearms and the like. Indeed, peasant organizations here and elsewhere in the developing world derive their triumphalist motive from religion.
I interviewed the Colorum leader Pedro Calosa twice in Tayug in the ‘50s when I was with the old Manila Times. It was the harvest season and I came upon him and his wife at work in the fields just outside the town. He was small and very dark. In his youth he had gone to Hawaii like so many young Ilokanos to work in the sugar and pineapple plantations there. While in Hawaii, he organized the farm workers. Deported home, he worked the land as a tenant farmer and started organizing the barrio folk.
Pedro Calosa claimed that the spirits of Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini—all these illustrious dead—had entered his body. Why these heroes? Because they sacrificed for this land. We see in this simple explanation then the nationalist cant become flesh.
Calosa also said all the peasants in the country were bonded together by the soil and when the Colorums struck, they expected the entire peasantry would rise with them. It did not happen for though suffering had fired them, the rest who were oppressed had become comfortable with their chains. The Colorums holed up in the Catholic church until the following day when a Constabulary company from Manila arrived and dislodged them.
Like Rene Peñas of Sumilao, Pedro Calosa of Tayug was murdered; his passing evoked no outcry even from the poor he so tenaciously defended.
The Sakdal revolt erupted a scant four years after the failed Colorum uprising. The acknowledged founder of the Sakdal (to defend) movement was Benigno Ramos, a minor government functionary, Tagalog writer and eloquent rabblerouser. He advocated the partitioning of the haciendas and the expulsion of the United States. He was also pro-Japanese as were some politicians at the time who saw in the Japanese experience a possible model for our own modernization, as well as emancipation from Western imperialism. As a political party, the Sakdalistas were well knit, welded together by class feelings. On May 2, 1935, they seized municipal buildings in Laguna and Bulacan. The revolt was immediately crushed but not after many were killed. Benigno Ramos fled to Japan and returned during the Japanese Occupation. The Sakdals then morphed into the Ganap Party and formed the dreaded Makapili which brought death to many Filipinos. We see in the Sakdals, a nationalist peasant-based movement, corrupted into a tool of Japanese conquest.
In spite of its ignoble deterioration, like the Colorums, the Sakdals signify peasant support for revolution.
In the mid ‘50s in Laguna, in the shadow of Mt. Makiling, which is deified by many of the people in its environs. I met Valentin de los Santos, the leader of the Watawat ng Lahi — the Rizalista faction, later known as the Lapiang Malaya. He figured in the front pages of the newspapers in May 1967 when he led a motley band in a planned Malacañang demonstration. They paused in Taft Avenue in Pasay.
They were in gaudy red and white uniform with yellow capes, and were armed with long bolos. Like the Colorums, they believed that their pig-Latin chants and amulets made them invincible. The Constabulary challenged them and when the smoke of battle cleared, more than 30 of De Los Santos’ ignorant followers lay dead on the pavement. What a waste of human life! Had the military any sense of the past and learned from the Colorums and other nativistic peasant movements, they would have simply sent a sergeant in the resplendent regalia of a high-ranking officer, with golden epaulets and all that gleaming braid to mollify the farmers. Valentin de los Santos was arrested and confined to the Mandaluyong Psychopathic Hospital where he was murdered like Pedro Calosa,
The Hukbalahap (short for Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon or the People’s Army Against the Japanese) started as guerrillas during the Japanese Occupation and became the best organized guerrilla force; later demonized by the United States at the start of the Cold War in 1946. It became HMB (Hukbo Magpalaya ng Bayan) (Army to Liberate the People). I followed closely its genesis and eventual decay. I knew some of its leaders, Fred Saulo, Casto Alejandrino, the Lava brothers and Luis Taruc who became my compadre. Their iron commitment, their tremendous capacity for sacrifice were truly admirable.
Only the other day, Francisco Lava of the succeeding Lava generation and I were reminiscing about his forebears who certainly were not dirt poor tenant farmers. The Lavas, Casto Alejandrino belonged to the wealthy principalia as did Pedro Abad Santos whom Luis Taruc idolized. Juan Feleo of Nueva Ecija who was elected member of Congress in the early Forties was also one such paragon — rich, urbane, he gave up everything, his lands, his family, his life for the peasantry. I recreated Luis Taruc whom I knew best as Ka Lucio, the faded revolutionary in my novel Mass.
The Huks were eventually fractured not really by ideological disagreements or ethnic loyalties but by the unsinkable egoism of its leaders — the very same tragic flaw which sundered the New People’s Army and almost all of our fledgling political institutions.
An element of religiosity also suffused the Huks, not so much in their allegiance to the communist creed. Among the lower echelons was the same religiosity that infused the Colorums and the Sakdals. As Luis Taruc himself had confided — if he was a bit more opportunistic, he would have exploited that religiosity of his followers, some of whom had regarded him as possessed with unearthly powers, which explained his miraculous escapes.
The greatest tragedy during the administration of President Cory Aquino happened in the late afternoon of January 22, 1986 when some 20 farmer demonstrators were killed in Mendiola street by the military. How could such a tragedy occur? Whose fault was it? The farmers under Jaime Tadeo had wanted to see the President to press their claims for agrarian reform which Cory, in the previous election campaign, had promised. She was not ignorant of the agrarian unrest that cankered Central Luzon where her vast 6,000 hectare-hacienda is located — the sanctuary no less of the New People’s Army Commander, Dante Buscayno. She refused to see the farmers because, as she explained, “they had no appointment.”
It was all there on television for us to see — the volleys of gunfire, the frenzied dash for cover of the demonstrators, the dead and wounded sprawled on the pavement.
Prof. Toru Yano of the Kyoto Center of Southeast Asian Studies told me later that Cory was elected to get the Nobel Peace Prize that year after the triumph of EDSA I. Professor Yano who was the Asian member of that Nobel Committee said that senseless massacre aborted it.
In death, that tiller from Sumilao, at the very least, will be remembered for he had a name. But those who fell in Mendiola, and all over the world as well, those selfless men with the plow who feed us, will pass as anonymously as the beasts of burden that help make this sweet earth bear fruit. We who survive, who are sustained by their labor are yoked with them. If we can, nameless though they were, we must always remember what they did, render imperishable the terrible injustice of their dying — an outrage which will never be redressed. This, too, is the indelible shame we must bear for having elected to power the very same tyrants who forged their chains, and worse, became their remorseless executioners.
In the Senate, the most important agenda in Senator Loren Legarda’s 2010 platform is her espousal of agriculture, her hopes that eventually we will be able to feed 90 million Filipinos. In media, I salute the economist Solita Monsod for her dogged support for the peasantry, an advocacy backed by competent scholarship. Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales, the Catcholic Bishops’ Conference, too, and all those religious orders, the Jesuits— demand agrarian reform. We are grateful to the late Fr. Hector Mauri who devoted a lifetime to the welfare of the sacadas of Negros, so, too, to Fr. Arsenio C. Jesena, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, and to so many young priests and nuns.
The revolutionary tradition fortified by the peasantry is the dimly remembered continuum in our history. Even the New People’s Army — in spite of its wretched failure after 40 years — is agrarian in its inspiration. I had asked Luis Taruc if any of the NPA cadres ever visited him to learn from him or, at the very least, establish that connection — and he said, no.
There, of course, lies what ails so many of the attempts to reform this country. The methods are not indigenized, the young revolutionists think they are reinventing the wheel.
For those of us who have plowed a fallow field and planted rice, who have watched the greening of the land, the transformation of emerald expanses into vistas of shimmering gold as the grain ripens — we know there is no sight more evocative than this, or a scent as fragrant as that of the newly harvested field. Verily, it is the peasants who understand the vibrant meaning of all these, of mother earth as the nation we must love and worship, our most precious gift from God. Such devotion is enshrined in our national anthem, sang by every schoolchild. To sing the anthem in its prescribed form, to honor our flag — these are much too little a price for us Filipinos to pay.
So then, if the peasant is the true nationalist — he could also be the sterling revolutionary who subscribes implicitly to what that Sakdal general, Salud Algabre said in 1935. “No rebellion ever fails — each one is a step in the right direction.”
The murder the other week of Rene Peñas, who led the Sumilao farmers in their march from Bukidnon to Manila, and the violent eviction of the demonstrators from the premises of Congress at about the same time, evoked painful memories of peasant travail in the past. Rene Peñas was certainly not the first farm leader to die at the hands of those who oppose agrarian reform. And those demonstrators in Congress belong to a devoted lineage of farmers who tried — and failed — to redress their sorry lot. Sure, the comprehensive agrarian reform program has been extended but so much has yet to be done, particularly in the coconut and sugar lands.
We are an agricultural country that should be able to produce enough food for ourselves, but this government, dominated as it has always been by landlords, has long ignored the peasantry. In a sense, its hierarchs have never grasped the profound nationalist and religious roots of the aspirations of our very poor as well as their rigid compulsion to revolt.
Let us start with the Colorums of Tayug, Pangasinan in 1931. My first informant on that mini-rebellion was the late Narciso Ramos, father of President Fidel V. Ramos. He was then a journalist in Asingan near Tayug, just like Rosales where I was born. He had written about the uprising, knew its origins in landlord oppression for in Asingan, as in Rosales, were believers of the faith.
Colorum is not the official name of that peasant group. The word is from the Latin mass, and they believed in quasi-religious chants and anting-anting (charms), which supposedly endowed them with superpowers. Soon after the word came to mean illegal objects like colorum jeepneys, colorum firearms and the like. Indeed, peasant organizations here and elsewhere in the developing world derive their triumphalist motive from religion.
I interviewed the Colorum leader Pedro Calosa twice in Tayug in the ‘50s when I was with the old Manila Times. It was the harvest season and I came upon him and his wife at work in the fields just outside the town. He was small and very dark. In his youth he had gone to Hawaii like so many young Ilokanos to work in the sugar and pineapple plantations there. While in Hawaii, he organized the farm workers. Deported home, he worked the land as a tenant farmer and started organizing the barrio folk.
Pedro Calosa claimed that the spirits of Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini—all these illustrious dead—had entered his body. Why these heroes? Because they sacrificed for this land. We see in this simple explanation then the nationalist cant become flesh.
Calosa also said all the peasants in the country were bonded together by the soil and when the Colorums struck, they expected the entire peasantry would rise with them. It did not happen for though suffering had fired them, the rest who were oppressed had become comfortable with their chains. The Colorums holed up in the Catholic church until the following day when a Constabulary company from Manila arrived and dislodged them.
Like Rene Peñas of Sumilao, Pedro Calosa of Tayug was murdered; his passing evoked no outcry even from the poor he so tenaciously defended.
The Sakdal revolt erupted a scant four years after the failed Colorum uprising. The acknowledged founder of the Sakdal (to defend) movement was Benigno Ramos, a minor government functionary, Tagalog writer and eloquent rabblerouser. He advocated the partitioning of the haciendas and the expulsion of the United States. He was also pro-Japanese as were some politicians at the time who saw in the Japanese experience a possible model for our own modernization, as well as emancipation from Western imperialism. As a political party, the Sakdalistas were well knit, welded together by class feelings. On May 2, 1935, they seized municipal buildings in Laguna and Bulacan. The revolt was immediately crushed but not after many were killed. Benigno Ramos fled to Japan and returned during the Japanese Occupation. The Sakdals then morphed into the Ganap Party and formed the dreaded Makapili which brought death to many Filipinos. We see in the Sakdals, a nationalist peasant-based movement, corrupted into a tool of Japanese conquest.
In spite of its ignoble deterioration, like the Colorums, the Sakdals signify peasant support for revolution.
In the mid ‘50s in Laguna, in the shadow of Mt. Makiling, which is deified by many of the people in its environs. I met Valentin de los Santos, the leader of the Watawat ng Lahi — the Rizalista faction, later known as the Lapiang Malaya. He figured in the front pages of the newspapers in May 1967 when he led a motley band in a planned Malacañang demonstration. They paused in Taft Avenue in Pasay.
They were in gaudy red and white uniform with yellow capes, and were armed with long bolos. Like the Colorums, they believed that their pig-Latin chants and amulets made them invincible. The Constabulary challenged them and when the smoke of battle cleared, more than 30 of De Los Santos’ ignorant followers lay dead on the pavement. What a waste of human life! Had the military any sense of the past and learned from the Colorums and other nativistic peasant movements, they would have simply sent a sergeant in the resplendent regalia of a high-ranking officer, with golden epaulets and all that gleaming braid to mollify the farmers. Valentin de los Santos was arrested and confined to the Mandaluyong Psychopathic Hospital where he was murdered like Pedro Calosa,
The Hukbalahap (short for Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon or the People’s Army Against the Japanese) started as guerrillas during the Japanese Occupation and became the best organized guerrilla force; later demonized by the United States at the start of the Cold War in 1946. It became HMB (Hukbo Magpalaya ng Bayan) (Army to Liberate the People). I followed closely its genesis and eventual decay. I knew some of its leaders, Fred Saulo, Casto Alejandrino, the Lava brothers and Luis Taruc who became my compadre. Their iron commitment, their tremendous capacity for sacrifice were truly admirable.
Only the other day, Francisco Lava of the succeeding Lava generation and I were reminiscing about his forebears who certainly were not dirt poor tenant farmers. The Lavas, Casto Alejandrino belonged to the wealthy principalia as did Pedro Abad Santos whom Luis Taruc idolized. Juan Feleo of Nueva Ecija who was elected member of Congress in the early Forties was also one such paragon — rich, urbane, he gave up everything, his lands, his family, his life for the peasantry. I recreated Luis Taruc whom I knew best as Ka Lucio, the faded revolutionary in my novel Mass.
The Huks were eventually fractured not really by ideological disagreements or ethnic loyalties but by the unsinkable egoism of its leaders — the very same tragic flaw which sundered the New People’s Army and almost all of our fledgling political institutions.
An element of religiosity also suffused the Huks, not so much in their allegiance to the communist creed. Among the lower echelons was the same religiosity that infused the Colorums and the Sakdals. As Luis Taruc himself had confided — if he was a bit more opportunistic, he would have exploited that religiosity of his followers, some of whom had regarded him as possessed with unearthly powers, which explained his miraculous escapes.
The greatest tragedy during the administration of President Cory Aquino happened in the late afternoon of January 22, 1986 when some 20 farmer demonstrators were killed in Mendiola street by the military. How could such a tragedy occur? Whose fault was it? The farmers under Jaime Tadeo had wanted to see the President to press their claims for agrarian reform which Cory, in the previous election campaign, had promised. She was not ignorant of the agrarian unrest that cankered Central Luzon where her vast 6,000 hectare-hacienda is located — the sanctuary no less of the New People’s Army Commander, Dante Buscayno. She refused to see the farmers because, as she explained, “they had no appointment.”
It was all there on television for us to see — the volleys of gunfire, the frenzied dash for cover of the demonstrators, the dead and wounded sprawled on the pavement.
Prof. Toru Yano of the Kyoto Center of Southeast Asian Studies told me later that Cory was elected to get the Nobel Peace Prize that year after the triumph of EDSA I. Professor Yano who was the Asian member of that Nobel Committee said that senseless massacre aborted it.
In death, that tiller from Sumilao, at the very least, will be remembered for he had a name. But those who fell in Mendiola, and all over the world as well, those selfless men with the plow who feed us, will pass as anonymously as the beasts of burden that help make this sweet earth bear fruit. We who survive, who are sustained by their labor are yoked with them. If we can, nameless though they were, we must always remember what they did, render imperishable the terrible injustice of their dying — an outrage which will never be redressed. This, too, is the indelible shame we must bear for having elected to power the very same tyrants who forged their chains, and worse, became their remorseless executioners.
In the Senate, the most important agenda in Senator Loren Legarda’s 2010 platform is her espousal of agriculture, her hopes that eventually we will be able to feed 90 million Filipinos. In media, I salute the economist Solita Monsod for her dogged support for the peasantry, an advocacy backed by competent scholarship. Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales, the Catcholic Bishops’ Conference, too, and all those religious orders, the Jesuits— demand agrarian reform. We are grateful to the late Fr. Hector Mauri who devoted a lifetime to the welfare of the sacadas of Negros, so, too, to Fr. Arsenio C. Jesena, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, and to so many young priests and nuns.
The revolutionary tradition fortified by the peasantry is the dimly remembered continuum in our history. Even the New People’s Army — in spite of its wretched failure after 40 years — is agrarian in its inspiration. I had asked Luis Taruc if any of the NPA cadres ever visited him to learn from him or, at the very least, establish that connection — and he said, no.
There, of course, lies what ails so many of the attempts to reform this country. The methods are not indigenized, the young revolutionists think they are reinventing the wheel.
For those of us who have plowed a fallow field and planted rice, who have watched the greening of the land, the transformation of emerald expanses into vistas of shimmering gold as the grain ripens — we know there is no sight more evocative than this, or a scent as fragrant as that of the newly harvested field. Verily, it is the peasants who understand the vibrant meaning of all these, of mother earth as the nation we must love and worship, our most precious gift from God. Such devotion is enshrined in our national anthem, sang by every schoolchild. To sing the anthem in its prescribed form, to honor our flag — these are much too little a price for us Filipinos to pay.
So then, if the peasant is the true nationalist — he could also be the sterling revolutionary who subscribes implicitly to what that Sakdal general, Salud Algabre said in 1935. “No rebellion ever fails — each one is a step in the right direction.”
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Remembering the decisive Battle of Ising
By Germelina Lacorte
Inquirer Mindanao
First Posted 20:27:00 06/27/2009
Filed Under: Culture (general), Veterans Affairs, People
DAVAO CITY—“It was a foggy morning when I received a special order to proceed to Ising.”
Former Lt. Silverstre Gavina, a World War II veteran from Davao City, was referring to the river in Carmen town in Davao del Norte, where one of the most decisive battles against the Japanese forces in the country took place 64 years ago.
“We left Maco (now a town of Compostela Valley) at midnight,” he recounts in the book, “Battle of Ising: The Untold Story of the 130th Infantry Regiment in the Liberation of Davao and Mindanao.”
“It was raining hard and we had to penetrate untrodden jungles for a shorter route to Ising,” he said. “Vines were tied to the waistline of a guide, my men following him to prevent being separated and getting lost in the jungles.”
Gavina’s account, which he narrated again to his children, Guia and Remy Gavina, is one of the stories of 22 veterans in the book written by Marie Silva-Vallejo.
Hastening liberation
The writer is a daughter of Lt. Col. Saturnino Silva, the commanding officer of the 130th Infantry Regiment, who led 1,500 of his men in the Battle of Ising. Silva issued the special order that reached Gavina on May 1, 1945.
The 272-page book, released in May, documented the May 3-10, 1945 battle that, according to Vallejo, hastened the liberation of Mindanao from the Japanese.
Gavina, a Davao City police detective before the war, escaped to the hills and joined the resistance after the Japanese overran the city on Dec. 8, 1941. In that decisive battle at the Ising River, he brought in 55 men who joined Silva’s troops. Along with the American forces sweeping Davao, Silva’s unit effectively sandwiched the Japanese garrison in Carmen town.
But Vallejo, who grew up and studied in the United States, did not hear about Ising until a few years ago, when she read a brochure of the battle’s reenactment at a Carmen high school.
The man who led the battle
“What caught my attention was the man who led that battle,” she said in an interview. “He was my father.”
“I wanted to know more about my dad and what he did during the war, because I never knew about it,” she said. “But as I kept searching for him, Ising kept coming up.”
Silva landed in Butuan Bay with four Filipino radio specialists on May 2, 1945, on board the USS Narwhal. The submarine arrived from Australia, the training ground of coast watchers, radio specialists, commando and intelligence agents during the war.
It was also in Brisbane where US Gen. Douglas McArthur based his command in the Pacific.
In the book, Vallejo noted how the headquarters of the US South West Pacific Area (SWPA) regarded the Mindanao guerrilla movement as the best organized among the resistance groups in the Philippines and that radio signals from Darwin, Australia, were heard very clear in Mindanao, allowing McArthur to keep constant communication with the guerrillas.
Professor Ricardo Trota said in the foreword that most of the stories about the war had always been focused in Luzon though there were significant battles in the Visayas and Mindanao.
Ising was one of them, said Vallejo. “It was not the most important battle, nor the biggest and only battle in Mindanao, but it was one of the most decisive ones,” she said in an interview.
The battle practically stopped the Japanese soldiers, then garrisoned in Carmen, from escaping to northern Davao and the jungles of Agusan when the American troops were already approaching from Digos town in Davao del Sur.
North Davao and Agusan were still “unconquered wilderness” at that time and would have given refuge to the Japanese soldiers.
Inquirer Mindanao
First Posted 20:27:00 06/27/2009
Filed Under: Culture (general), Veterans Affairs, People
DAVAO CITY—“It was a foggy morning when I received a special order to proceed to Ising.”
Former Lt. Silverstre Gavina, a World War II veteran from Davao City, was referring to the river in Carmen town in Davao del Norte, where one of the most decisive battles against the Japanese forces in the country took place 64 years ago.
“We left Maco (now a town of Compostela Valley) at midnight,” he recounts in the book, “Battle of Ising: The Untold Story of the 130th Infantry Regiment in the Liberation of Davao and Mindanao.”
“It was raining hard and we had to penetrate untrodden jungles for a shorter route to Ising,” he said. “Vines were tied to the waistline of a guide, my men following him to prevent being separated and getting lost in the jungles.”
Gavina’s account, which he narrated again to his children, Guia and Remy Gavina, is one of the stories of 22 veterans in the book written by Marie Silva-Vallejo.
Hastening liberation
The writer is a daughter of Lt. Col. Saturnino Silva, the commanding officer of the 130th Infantry Regiment, who led 1,500 of his men in the Battle of Ising. Silva issued the special order that reached Gavina on May 1, 1945.
The 272-page book, released in May, documented the May 3-10, 1945 battle that, according to Vallejo, hastened the liberation of Mindanao from the Japanese.
Gavina, a Davao City police detective before the war, escaped to the hills and joined the resistance after the Japanese overran the city on Dec. 8, 1941. In that decisive battle at the Ising River, he brought in 55 men who joined Silva’s troops. Along with the American forces sweeping Davao, Silva’s unit effectively sandwiched the Japanese garrison in Carmen town.
But Vallejo, who grew up and studied in the United States, did not hear about Ising until a few years ago, when she read a brochure of the battle’s reenactment at a Carmen high school.
The man who led the battle
“What caught my attention was the man who led that battle,” she said in an interview. “He was my father.”
“I wanted to know more about my dad and what he did during the war, because I never knew about it,” she said. “But as I kept searching for him, Ising kept coming up.”
Silva landed in Butuan Bay with four Filipino radio specialists on May 2, 1945, on board the USS Narwhal. The submarine arrived from Australia, the training ground of coast watchers, radio specialists, commando and intelligence agents during the war.
It was also in Brisbane where US Gen. Douglas McArthur based his command in the Pacific.
In the book, Vallejo noted how the headquarters of the US South West Pacific Area (SWPA) regarded the Mindanao guerrilla movement as the best organized among the resistance groups in the Philippines and that radio signals from Darwin, Australia, were heard very clear in Mindanao, allowing McArthur to keep constant communication with the guerrillas.
Professor Ricardo Trota said in the foreword that most of the stories about the war had always been focused in Luzon though there were significant battles in the Visayas and Mindanao.
Ising was one of them, said Vallejo. “It was not the most important battle, nor the biggest and only battle in Mindanao, but it was one of the most decisive ones,” she said in an interview.
The battle practically stopped the Japanese soldiers, then garrisoned in Carmen, from escaping to northern Davao and the jungles of Agusan when the American troops were already approaching from Digos town in Davao del Sur.
North Davao and Agusan were still “unconquered wilderness” at that time and would have given refuge to the Japanese soldiers.
WHAT STUDENTS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE VIETNAM WAR
by Ronald Spector
The Vietnam War--or as the Vietnamese call it, the American
War--is the longest war in American history (so far) and the
first one the U.S. clearly lost. More significant for our
purposes, its history is also the most contested. How
contested it is can be readily illustrated by the titles of
two influential books published during the last three years.
The most recent, by John Prados, is called Vietnam: The
History of an Unwinnable War (University Press of Kansas,
April 2009). The other, by Mark Moyar, is called Triumph
Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-65 (Cambridge University
Press, 2006). Whether the American war in Vietnam was an
intractable mess or a near triumph tragically missed, in
other words whether the war was "winnable" or not, is at the
heart of most historical discussions about the U.S. in
Vietnam. (Both sides in the debate usually cheerfully
disregard the question of how "winning" is to be
understood.)
Of course there is an important subtext to this debate. The
Vietnam War called into question many of the most widespread
assumptions that Americans had held about their country:
that the U.S. was a special nation, that it adhered to a
unique set of values, that its foreign policy was designed
to promote freedom and safeguard democracy, that American
soldiers were always good-hearted and patriotic, that
American leaders could be trusted to carry out the complex
and often secret tasks of national security with competence
and integrity. Some writers and politicians would like to
partially restore some of this faith and confidence by
showing that the U.S. loss in Vietnam could have been
avoided and that it was not, in any case, due to systemic
faults in American government and society. It is therefore
rather difficult to identify with precision what "students
ought to know about the Vietnam War" because much of what
they probably ought to know about is subject to dispute.
As a start we need to remember that, in a sense there were
several separate, though related, Vietnam Wars going on at
the same time between 1965 and 1973. There was the air war
against North Vietnam and against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in
Laos. There was the ground war in South Vietnam waged by the
North Vietnamese Army, the Americans, the South Vietnamese
and the Viet Cong (who called their army the People's
Liberation Armed Forces--PLAF). There was the "Other War" to
establish the South Vietnamese government's control over the
rural areas and destroy the Viet Cong presence there, often
referred to as the pacification campaign. In the U.S. there
was the "war at home"--the growth of both organized and
unorganized opposition to the war, the movement of public
opinion, and the impact of those developments on domestic
politics. And there was what might be called the diplomacy
of the war involving negotiations, at first through
intermediaries, between the United States and North Vietnam
as well as relations with U.S. allies, the Soviet Union, and
eventually China. Of these, the two that have been subject
to most argument are the air war and the Pacification
campaign.
AIR WAR
The sustained bombing of North Vietnam began in the Spring
of 1965. By the end of that year American aircraft had flown
over 55,000 sorties and dropped 33,000 tons of bombs on the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam. By the end of 1967 the U.S.
had dropped 860,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam. That was
more than the 630,000 tons of bombs dropped during the
Korean War and far more than the 500,000 tons dropped in the
War against Japan. About 35,000 North Vietnamese are
estimated to have died in the bombing, which the communists
reported to have destroyed virtually all industrial and
communications facilities built since 1954.
There was heated disagreement about what all this bombing
had accomplished. When the initial air attacks against North
Vietnam were launched, strategists in the White House had
expected that the pain and shock inflicted by the bombing
would soon compel the North Vietnamese to stop, or at least
slow down, their support of the war in South Vietnam. They
also believed that the bombing would boost the morale of the
Republic of South Vietnam, sorely beset by increasingly
destructive attacks by the Viet Cong.
The bombing did boost the morale of South Vietnamese
leaders--or at least they told the Americans it did.
Unfortunately, this display of will and determination had
little apparent effect on the North Vietnamese, whose
commitment to the war in the south showed no sign of
abating. Washington leaders were acutely aware that
unleashing dozens of aircraft and thousands of pounds of
bombs against a country on the border of the People's
Republic of China and closely allied to the Soviet Union
carried considerable risks. Many of them held vivid memories
of the Chinese intervention in Korea fifteen years before.
For those reasons the bombings were carefully regulated and
modulated from Washington. Each list of targets to be bombed
was submitted one (later two) weeks at a time through a long
chain stretching from the military commands to the
Department of Defense, the State Department, the White
House, and often the President himself. Washington officials
even determined the strength, altitude, and direction of
each strike.
The President and his top civilian advisers also saw the
bombing as a slow and deliberate means of compelling the
North Vietnamese to ease their pressure on the south. The
carrot of stopping the bombing was deemed as important as
the stick of continuing it, and bombing pauses were provided
for. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Army, Navy, and
Air commanders in Vietnam had no use for carrots and sticks.
Their preference was for sledgehammers. They wanted to
attack North Vietnam rapidly, unrelentingly, with
overwhelming force. Instead they had to settle for a finely
adjusted mix of restraints, of fits and starts emanating
from Washington. Aviators saw this approach as absurd and
dangerous, and the generals saw it as militarily unsound and
futile.
With the commitment of American combat troops to Vietnam in
the summer of 1965, Washington's emphasis shifted from
bombing as a way of breaking North Vietnamese will to
bombing as a way of depriving Hanoi of the means to wage war
in the south. The list of targets was steadily increased,
along with the rate and scale of attacks. Yet the increase
was gradual, and entire areas of North Vietnam, including
the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, which contained important
industrial and port facilities, were spared. Also off limits
were areas within 25 miles of the Chinese border.
As the bombing continued, North Vietnam greatly strengthened
its air defenses. China and Russia supplied it with
sophisticated antiaircraft guns, radars, and missiles, as
well as jet fighter aircraft, until by 1967 it had one of
the most modern air defense systems in the world. The
limited bombing campaign in the north, while increasing
numbers of American troops were being committed to combat in
the south, seemed ineffective and illogical to the Joint
Chiefs and to most military commanders in the field. The
Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp,
expressed a view that would be repeated by military leaders
many times throughout the war when he declared at the end of
1965, "The Armed Forces of the United States should not be
required to fight this war with one arm tied behind their
backs"
On the other hand, the Central Intelligence Agency
emphasized that North Vietnam was an agricultural nation
with a primitive transportation system and few industries.
Almost all of the communists' military equipment came from
China and the Soviet Union.
As for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in the
South, they were dependent on the North for only a very
small amount of supplies and equipment, estimated at about
100 tons a day. To the intelligence analysts, then, North
Vietnam looked like a very unrewarding object of air attack;
there simply weren't enough high-value targets. Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara's analysts calculated that the
United States was spending almost ten dollars in direct
operational costs for every one dollar of damage inflicted
on North Vietnam. Those operational costs also included
almost five hundred planes lost and hundreds of aviators
killed or captured by the end of 1966.
"To bomb the North sufficiently to make a radical impact
upon Hanoi's political, economic, and social structure,"
McNamara told the President in October 1966, "would require
an effort which we could make but which would not be
stomached either by our own people or by world opinion, and
it would involve a serious risk of drawing us into war with
China."
The debate over the strategy and operational approach to the
air war is far from settled. However, with the availability
of documents from the "other side" due to the end of the
Cold War, it is now possible to evaluate the criticism of
Johnson's direction of the war in a new light. On the one
hand, there were factions in North Vietnam who had doubts
about the policy of waging all-out war in South at any cost.
To these doubters, the bombing provided further evidence
that the attempt to win the south was not worth the costs to
the progress of building socialism in the North. So the
bombing did have an impact on some communist leaders. On the
other hand, the doubtful faction was quite powerless to do
anything against the much stronger "liberate-the-south-now"
faction, headed by Le Duan, that completely dominated
decision making in Hanoi through early 1968.
Similarly, we can now see that Johnson and his advisors were
probably right in being super-cautious about the danger of
intervention by China. Thousands of Chinese military
engineers and antiaircraft units were heavily involved in
the defense of North Vietnam. China had explicitly promised
Hanoi that it would intervene should the U.S. invade North
Vietnam. And, unlike in the case of Korea, the Chinese
government had given the United States clear and firm,
albeit secret, warnings about Beijing's reaction should the
U.S. go too far in Vietnam.
PACIFICATION
Another subject of lively debate is pacification and the
question of whether the U.S. actually won the war in South
Vietnam between 1968 and 1972 by shifting its emphasis to a
greatly enhanced counterinsurgency effort to win the "hearts
and minds" of the rural population. This effort was made
more feasible by the heavy losses that the National
Liberation Front (NLF) had suffered during Tet and follow-up
offensives in 1968. A new intelligence and surveillance
program called "Phoenix" was launched, intended to
specifically identify and neutralize the remaining Viet Cong
cadre.
By early 1969 it was apparent that the security situation in
the countryside was improving. Communist defections reached
an all-time high, and thousands of Viet Cong agents and
functionaries were reported killed or captured. By the end
of 1969 over 70 percent of the population were rated by
American pacification analysts as living in areas under
government control, as opposed to 42 percent at the
beginning of 1968.
Even those who had come to regard all Saigon reports and
statistics with deep skepticism could not deny the physical
evidence of improved security. Roads and rivers that had
been closed for years were reopened to civilian traffic.
Bridges were repaired, and even the railroad began regular
service again. By 1970 the dangerous "Street Without Joy"
area of coastal Quang Tri province had been cleared of major
enemy units for the first time since 1963.
William Colby, the CIA official who headed CORDS, the
American umbrella organization for direction and support of
pacification, not surprisingly sees that effort as a great
success, a "lost victory" as Colby termed it in his memoirs
(Lost Victory, 1989). General Creighton Abrams' biographer,
Lewis Sorley, expressed a similar view in one of the more
memorable passages in Vietnam War literature. "There came a
day," Sorley wrote, "when the war was won. The fighting
wasn't over but the war was won. This achievement can
probably best be dated in late 1970_ By then the South
Vietnamese countryside had been widely pacified_"
Despite the confidence of Colby and Sorley, it remains
impossible to know a lot about the counterinsurgency
situation between 1969 and 1972 without more detailed
studies for many of South Vietnam's widely varying
provinces. None of the few that have been published so far
provided much support for the idea that the pacification
struggle was "won" by 1970.
My own view is that during 1969-71 the South Vietnamese and
Americans came as close as they ever would to winning the
war for the countryside, but not close enough. The Viet
Cong, beset by losses and shortages of supplies, hounded by
South Vietnamese government security forces, still hung on
and did not disintegrate. They retained a number of their
base areas in the more inaccessible parts of the Mekong
Delta, along the Cambodian and Laotian borders, and in
southern I Corps, the military region bordering North
Vietnam. Even in the provinces that appeared to be most
firmly under Saigon's control, communists were far from
extinct. "We rid the country of larger enemy forces and
armed every South Vietnamese who could stand still," Colonel
Jack Weissinger, a senior adviser with extensive experience
in Vietnam, stated. "Yet the government forces were still
fearful. They were more afraid of the dedication,
persistence, and uncompromising attitude of [the Viet Cong]
than they were in their numbers. In some villages we got the
Front cadres down to two or three but that was just enough
to hang in there."
Colby's reports themselves revealed that in 1971 nearly 45
percent of rural villagers in I Corps lived within 1,000
meters of a recent terrorist incident. In Hau Ngia Province
in III Corps near Saigon during the same period, an official
or a Hoi Chanh was killed or wounded every few days
throughout the year. More important, the top leadership of
the Saigon government and army remained as dependent as ever
upon the United States, not only for military support but
for ideas, strategy, doctrine, and tactics. The same
problems of sloth, incompetence, corruption, and nepotism
that had always plagued the military and administrative
organs of the South Vietnamese government remained generally
unchanged. A province or district chief might be removed
here, a more competent and honest commander or administrator
might be promoted there, usually as a result of relentless
prodding, but the general picture remained unchanged.
AMERICAN GI EXPERIENCE
Compelling as the Pacification debate may be to
counterinsurgency experts (who have begun to crawl out of
the woodwork again), they are unlikely to be of great
interest to students. Instead, what most fascinates young
men and women about the war are the individual experiences
of American GIs in Vietnam. Teachers are unlikely ever to
have a class that is not well-supplied with students who
have stories from their parents, uncles, aunts,
grandparents, neighbors, et al. about what it was really
like "in the Nam." Perhaps the best way to regard these
stories is to recall the observation of one of my Quantico
instructors many years ago. "No Vietnam story is ever
completely true or completely false."
It could hardly be otherwise. Well over two million men
served in Vietnam between 1963 and 1974. The great majority
served there only about one year during the eight-year
period the U.S. was directly involved in combat. The
conditions and intensity of operations in Vietnam varied
enormously; from the World War I-style warfare of Khe Sanh
to the "amphibious" riverine warfare of the Mekong Delta,
from fierce clashes in the mountains and jungles to endless
patrols in the agricultural lowlands, where the main menaces
were often mines and booby traps. Even in a single province,
the pattern of battle and death could vary enormously. A
study prepared for the Pentagon of operation by a single
Marine division in one province during 1968 and 1969 showed
wide variations in the tactics employed by the U.S. and
communist forces, the terrain, and the cost in U.S.
casualties. The causes of the casualties also varied. In one
operation, almost 30 percent of the casualties were due to
mines and booby traps. In another, there were virtually no
losses to those devices.
Despite the attention paid in the media to such large
engagements as Khe Sanh, An Loc, and the struggles around
Hue and Saigon during Tet, most of the "battles" of the
Vietnam War were short, sharp clashes between company-,
platoon-, or squad-size units. The majority lasted only a
few hours, often only a few minutes. There were hundreds of
such small engagements during 1968 in Vietnam, and, although
clashes between large units continued to capture the
attention of the Pentagon and the press, these small
engagements remain the characteristic "battle" for most GIs.
Short as they usually were, these small battles could be
costly indeed. Most U.S. casualties occurred during the
first few minutes of a fight, before the U.S. unit could
bring supporting artillery aircraft to bear on the enemy.
The head of the MACV operations center, Brigadier General
J.R. Chaisson, estimated that in engagements in the rugged,
jungle-covered mountains of the central highlands, it was
not unusual for a U.S. company to sustain twenty to fifty
casualties in the first few minutes of contact.
In popular culture the Vietnam veteran is almost always
portrayed as a man (never a woman) who spent most of his
time in the jungle confronting the elusive Viet Cong; a man
who had experienced many terrifying and tragic events in the
course of frequent combat and now suffers from some sort of
post-traumatic stress disorder. Given this widely accepted
image, it may come as a surprise to your students that the
majority of GIs who served in Vietnam were seldom, if ever,
in direct contact with the enemy. What proportion of men
actually experienced combat in the television sense is hard
to measure exactly. One method is to count the percentage
serving in maneuver battalions. A maneuver battalion is a
combat unit of battalion size, usually infantry, armored
cavalry tanks, or mechanized infantry, that is able to move
under its own resources and engage the enemy with its
organic weapons. In 1968, the U.S. had 112 maneuver
battalions, and Department of Defense figures showed 29
percent of total Army personnel in Vietnam and 34 percent of
the Marines as serving in maneuver battalions.
The large majority of GIs who did not operate in the field
served as supply, service, or administrative troops
stationed in or near one of the dozen-odd American base
complexes such as Quang Tri and Dong Ha in the north near
the DMZ, Phu Bai near Hue, Da Nang, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, and
Cam Ranh Bay along the central coast, and the Saigon-Bien
Hoa complex, the largest of all. All were located near large
airfield or port facilities and housed upwards of 10,000
U.S. troops.
In general, the larger the base or headquarters, the greater
were the amenities. Troops at the major installations often
enjoyed hot food, electricity, hot showers, a club, athletic
facilities, movies, and plenty of beer. Many clubs were air-
conditioned, and the larger ones featured dining rooms where
hamburgers, French fries, fried chicken, or steak were
always available.
This is not to imply that GIs "in the rear" had a wonderful
time--despite the derisive and contemptuous comments to that
effect by troops in the field. Most men in service units
worked hard at mind-numbing jobs 10 to 12 hours a day, seven
days a week. The heat, insects, blowing dust, flooding and
seas of mud during the rainy season were experienced by
soldiers in all types of jobs. There was also the
disquieting understanding that no place and no job was
completely safe.
"You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and
still know that your safety was provisional; that early
death, blindness, loss of legs, arms, or balls, major and
lasting disfigurement-- the whole rotten deal--could come in
on the freaky fluky as easily in the so-called expected
ways," the reporter Michael Herr wrote, "the roads were
mined, the trails booby-trapped, satchel charges and
grenades blew up jeeps and movie theaters, the VC got work
inside all the camps as shoe-shine boys and laundresses and
honey-dippers; they'd starch your fatigues and burn your s--
- and then go home and mortar your area. Saigon and Cholon
and Da Nang held such hostile vibes that you felt you were
dry-sniped every time someone looked at you."[1]
For the minority of GIs serving in combat units in the
field, life was not safe at all. Although officials in
Washington were fond of pointing out that the casualty rate
of American forces in Vietnam was considerably lower than in
World War II and Korea, this had far more to do with the
larger percentage of personnel in support units and the
availability of improved medical care than with any
differences in the intensity of combat. Men in maneuver
battalions, the units that actually did the fighting,
continued to run about the same chance of death or injury as
their older relatives who had fought in Korea or in the
Pacific. Indeed, during the first half of 1968 the overall
Vietnam casualty rate exceeded the overall rate of all
theaters in World War II, while the casualty rates for Army
and marine maneuver battalions was more than four times as
high.
So if we are going to make any sweeping generalizations
about a war that defies generalization, we might say that
the great majority of Vietnam GIs did not spend their time
patrolling or fighting in the mountains, jungles or rice
paddies, but for those who did, the dangers and the costs
were comparable to other twentieth-century American wars.
Like other disasters in American history--the Civil War, the
Great Depression, Pearl Harbor--the Vietnam War inspires
denial, rationalization, and finger-pointing. Americans
don't like stories without happy endings or problems without
solutions. But so as not to end on a completely negative
note, I would like to read a short portion of one of Jan
Herman's dozens of interviews in his Navy Medicine in
Vietnam (McFarland, Oct. 2008):
"I went back to Vietnam in 1997 with a few of the
Marines I knew from that era_. We remembered a village
called Nhi Ha. If you went to Nhi Ha in 1968 you were
going to die. That was guaranteed. [In 1997] the village
was still small but it had an elementary school. Some
kids came out of the school onto a grassy little slope
where we were eating our box lunches. One of the guys in
our group had a bottle of bubble soap. He stood upwind
from the kids. They stood on the grassy slope while Greg
blew bubbles across their faces. As they reached up and
tried to grab the bubbles they screamed with delight.
Watching this, I realized the war was over."
The Vietnam War--or as the Vietnamese call it, the American
War--is the longest war in American history (so far) and the
first one the U.S. clearly lost. More significant for our
purposes, its history is also the most contested. How
contested it is can be readily illustrated by the titles of
two influential books published during the last three years.
The most recent, by John Prados, is called Vietnam: The
History of an Unwinnable War (University Press of Kansas,
April 2009). The other, by Mark Moyar, is called Triumph
Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-65 (Cambridge University
Press, 2006). Whether the American war in Vietnam was an
intractable mess or a near triumph tragically missed, in
other words whether the war was "winnable" or not, is at the
heart of most historical discussions about the U.S. in
Vietnam. (Both sides in the debate usually cheerfully
disregard the question of how "winning" is to be
understood.)
Of course there is an important subtext to this debate. The
Vietnam War called into question many of the most widespread
assumptions that Americans had held about their country:
that the U.S. was a special nation, that it adhered to a
unique set of values, that its foreign policy was designed
to promote freedom and safeguard democracy, that American
soldiers were always good-hearted and patriotic, that
American leaders could be trusted to carry out the complex
and often secret tasks of national security with competence
and integrity. Some writers and politicians would like to
partially restore some of this faith and confidence by
showing that the U.S. loss in Vietnam could have been
avoided and that it was not, in any case, due to systemic
faults in American government and society. It is therefore
rather difficult to identify with precision what "students
ought to know about the Vietnam War" because much of what
they probably ought to know about is subject to dispute.
As a start we need to remember that, in a sense there were
several separate, though related, Vietnam Wars going on at
the same time between 1965 and 1973. There was the air war
against North Vietnam and against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in
Laos. There was the ground war in South Vietnam waged by the
North Vietnamese Army, the Americans, the South Vietnamese
and the Viet Cong (who called their army the People's
Liberation Armed Forces--PLAF). There was the "Other War" to
establish the South Vietnamese government's control over the
rural areas and destroy the Viet Cong presence there, often
referred to as the pacification campaign. In the U.S. there
was the "war at home"--the growth of both organized and
unorganized opposition to the war, the movement of public
opinion, and the impact of those developments on domestic
politics. And there was what might be called the diplomacy
of the war involving negotiations, at first through
intermediaries, between the United States and North Vietnam
as well as relations with U.S. allies, the Soviet Union, and
eventually China. Of these, the two that have been subject
to most argument are the air war and the Pacification
campaign.
AIR WAR
The sustained bombing of North Vietnam began in the Spring
of 1965. By the end of that year American aircraft had flown
over 55,000 sorties and dropped 33,000 tons of bombs on the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam. By the end of 1967 the U.S.
had dropped 860,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam. That was
more than the 630,000 tons of bombs dropped during the
Korean War and far more than the 500,000 tons dropped in the
War against Japan. About 35,000 North Vietnamese are
estimated to have died in the bombing, which the communists
reported to have destroyed virtually all industrial and
communications facilities built since 1954.
There was heated disagreement about what all this bombing
had accomplished. When the initial air attacks against North
Vietnam were launched, strategists in the White House had
expected that the pain and shock inflicted by the bombing
would soon compel the North Vietnamese to stop, or at least
slow down, their support of the war in South Vietnam. They
also believed that the bombing would boost the morale of the
Republic of South Vietnam, sorely beset by increasingly
destructive attacks by the Viet Cong.
The bombing did boost the morale of South Vietnamese
leaders--or at least they told the Americans it did.
Unfortunately, this display of will and determination had
little apparent effect on the North Vietnamese, whose
commitment to the war in the south showed no sign of
abating. Washington leaders were acutely aware that
unleashing dozens of aircraft and thousands of pounds of
bombs against a country on the border of the People's
Republic of China and closely allied to the Soviet Union
carried considerable risks. Many of them held vivid memories
of the Chinese intervention in Korea fifteen years before.
For those reasons the bombings were carefully regulated and
modulated from Washington. Each list of targets to be bombed
was submitted one (later two) weeks at a time through a long
chain stretching from the military commands to the
Department of Defense, the State Department, the White
House, and often the President himself. Washington officials
even determined the strength, altitude, and direction of
each strike.
The President and his top civilian advisers also saw the
bombing as a slow and deliberate means of compelling the
North Vietnamese to ease their pressure on the south. The
carrot of stopping the bombing was deemed as important as
the stick of continuing it, and bombing pauses were provided
for. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Army, Navy, and
Air commanders in Vietnam had no use for carrots and sticks.
Their preference was for sledgehammers. They wanted to
attack North Vietnam rapidly, unrelentingly, with
overwhelming force. Instead they had to settle for a finely
adjusted mix of restraints, of fits and starts emanating
from Washington. Aviators saw this approach as absurd and
dangerous, and the generals saw it as militarily unsound and
futile.
With the commitment of American combat troops to Vietnam in
the summer of 1965, Washington's emphasis shifted from
bombing as a way of breaking North Vietnamese will to
bombing as a way of depriving Hanoi of the means to wage war
in the south. The list of targets was steadily increased,
along with the rate and scale of attacks. Yet the increase
was gradual, and entire areas of North Vietnam, including
the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, which contained important
industrial and port facilities, were spared. Also off limits
were areas within 25 miles of the Chinese border.
As the bombing continued, North Vietnam greatly strengthened
its air defenses. China and Russia supplied it with
sophisticated antiaircraft guns, radars, and missiles, as
well as jet fighter aircraft, until by 1967 it had one of
the most modern air defense systems in the world. The
limited bombing campaign in the north, while increasing
numbers of American troops were being committed to combat in
the south, seemed ineffective and illogical to the Joint
Chiefs and to most military commanders in the field. The
Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp,
expressed a view that would be repeated by military leaders
many times throughout the war when he declared at the end of
1965, "The Armed Forces of the United States should not be
required to fight this war with one arm tied behind their
backs"
On the other hand, the Central Intelligence Agency
emphasized that North Vietnam was an agricultural nation
with a primitive transportation system and few industries.
Almost all of the communists' military equipment came from
China and the Soviet Union.
As for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in the
South, they were dependent on the North for only a very
small amount of supplies and equipment, estimated at about
100 tons a day. To the intelligence analysts, then, North
Vietnam looked like a very unrewarding object of air attack;
there simply weren't enough high-value targets. Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara's analysts calculated that the
United States was spending almost ten dollars in direct
operational costs for every one dollar of damage inflicted
on North Vietnam. Those operational costs also included
almost five hundred planes lost and hundreds of aviators
killed or captured by the end of 1966.
"To bomb the North sufficiently to make a radical impact
upon Hanoi's political, economic, and social structure,"
McNamara told the President in October 1966, "would require
an effort which we could make but which would not be
stomached either by our own people or by world opinion, and
it would involve a serious risk of drawing us into war with
China."
The debate over the strategy and operational approach to the
air war is far from settled. However, with the availability
of documents from the "other side" due to the end of the
Cold War, it is now possible to evaluate the criticism of
Johnson's direction of the war in a new light. On the one
hand, there were factions in North Vietnam who had doubts
about the policy of waging all-out war in South at any cost.
To these doubters, the bombing provided further evidence
that the attempt to win the south was not worth the costs to
the progress of building socialism in the North. So the
bombing did have an impact on some communist leaders. On the
other hand, the doubtful faction was quite powerless to do
anything against the much stronger "liberate-the-south-now"
faction, headed by Le Duan, that completely dominated
decision making in Hanoi through early 1968.
Similarly, we can now see that Johnson and his advisors were
probably right in being super-cautious about the danger of
intervention by China. Thousands of Chinese military
engineers and antiaircraft units were heavily involved in
the defense of North Vietnam. China had explicitly promised
Hanoi that it would intervene should the U.S. invade North
Vietnam. And, unlike in the case of Korea, the Chinese
government had given the United States clear and firm,
albeit secret, warnings about Beijing's reaction should the
U.S. go too far in Vietnam.
PACIFICATION
Another subject of lively debate is pacification and the
question of whether the U.S. actually won the war in South
Vietnam between 1968 and 1972 by shifting its emphasis to a
greatly enhanced counterinsurgency effort to win the "hearts
and minds" of the rural population. This effort was made
more feasible by the heavy losses that the National
Liberation Front (NLF) had suffered during Tet and follow-up
offensives in 1968. A new intelligence and surveillance
program called "Phoenix" was launched, intended to
specifically identify and neutralize the remaining Viet Cong
cadre.
By early 1969 it was apparent that the security situation in
the countryside was improving. Communist defections reached
an all-time high, and thousands of Viet Cong agents and
functionaries were reported killed or captured. By the end
of 1969 over 70 percent of the population were rated by
American pacification analysts as living in areas under
government control, as opposed to 42 percent at the
beginning of 1968.
Even those who had come to regard all Saigon reports and
statistics with deep skepticism could not deny the physical
evidence of improved security. Roads and rivers that had
been closed for years were reopened to civilian traffic.
Bridges were repaired, and even the railroad began regular
service again. By 1970 the dangerous "Street Without Joy"
area of coastal Quang Tri province had been cleared of major
enemy units for the first time since 1963.
William Colby, the CIA official who headed CORDS, the
American umbrella organization for direction and support of
pacification, not surprisingly sees that effort as a great
success, a "lost victory" as Colby termed it in his memoirs
(Lost Victory, 1989). General Creighton Abrams' biographer,
Lewis Sorley, expressed a similar view in one of the more
memorable passages in Vietnam War literature. "There came a
day," Sorley wrote, "when the war was won. The fighting
wasn't over but the war was won. This achievement can
probably best be dated in late 1970_ By then the South
Vietnamese countryside had been widely pacified_"
Despite the confidence of Colby and Sorley, it remains
impossible to know a lot about the counterinsurgency
situation between 1969 and 1972 without more detailed
studies for many of South Vietnam's widely varying
provinces. None of the few that have been published so far
provided much support for the idea that the pacification
struggle was "won" by 1970.
My own view is that during 1969-71 the South Vietnamese and
Americans came as close as they ever would to winning the
war for the countryside, but not close enough. The Viet
Cong, beset by losses and shortages of supplies, hounded by
South Vietnamese government security forces, still hung on
and did not disintegrate. They retained a number of their
base areas in the more inaccessible parts of the Mekong
Delta, along the Cambodian and Laotian borders, and in
southern I Corps, the military region bordering North
Vietnam. Even in the provinces that appeared to be most
firmly under Saigon's control, communists were far from
extinct. "We rid the country of larger enemy forces and
armed every South Vietnamese who could stand still," Colonel
Jack Weissinger, a senior adviser with extensive experience
in Vietnam, stated. "Yet the government forces were still
fearful. They were more afraid of the dedication,
persistence, and uncompromising attitude of [the Viet Cong]
than they were in their numbers. In some villages we got the
Front cadres down to two or three but that was just enough
to hang in there."
Colby's reports themselves revealed that in 1971 nearly 45
percent of rural villagers in I Corps lived within 1,000
meters of a recent terrorist incident. In Hau Ngia Province
in III Corps near Saigon during the same period, an official
or a Hoi Chanh was killed or wounded every few days
throughout the year. More important, the top leadership of
the Saigon government and army remained as dependent as ever
upon the United States, not only for military support but
for ideas, strategy, doctrine, and tactics. The same
problems of sloth, incompetence, corruption, and nepotism
that had always plagued the military and administrative
organs of the South Vietnamese government remained generally
unchanged. A province or district chief might be removed
here, a more competent and honest commander or administrator
might be promoted there, usually as a result of relentless
prodding, but the general picture remained unchanged.
AMERICAN GI EXPERIENCE
Compelling as the Pacification debate may be to
counterinsurgency experts (who have begun to crawl out of
the woodwork again), they are unlikely to be of great
interest to students. Instead, what most fascinates young
men and women about the war are the individual experiences
of American GIs in Vietnam. Teachers are unlikely ever to
have a class that is not well-supplied with students who
have stories from their parents, uncles, aunts,
grandparents, neighbors, et al. about what it was really
like "in the Nam." Perhaps the best way to regard these
stories is to recall the observation of one of my Quantico
instructors many years ago. "No Vietnam story is ever
completely true or completely false."
It could hardly be otherwise. Well over two million men
served in Vietnam between 1963 and 1974. The great majority
served there only about one year during the eight-year
period the U.S. was directly involved in combat. The
conditions and intensity of operations in Vietnam varied
enormously; from the World War I-style warfare of Khe Sanh
to the "amphibious" riverine warfare of the Mekong Delta,
from fierce clashes in the mountains and jungles to endless
patrols in the agricultural lowlands, where the main menaces
were often mines and booby traps. Even in a single province,
the pattern of battle and death could vary enormously. A
study prepared for the Pentagon of operation by a single
Marine division in one province during 1968 and 1969 showed
wide variations in the tactics employed by the U.S. and
communist forces, the terrain, and the cost in U.S.
casualties. The causes of the casualties also varied. In one
operation, almost 30 percent of the casualties were due to
mines and booby traps. In another, there were virtually no
losses to those devices.
Despite the attention paid in the media to such large
engagements as Khe Sanh, An Loc, and the struggles around
Hue and Saigon during Tet, most of the "battles" of the
Vietnam War were short, sharp clashes between company-,
platoon-, or squad-size units. The majority lasted only a
few hours, often only a few minutes. There were hundreds of
such small engagements during 1968 in Vietnam, and, although
clashes between large units continued to capture the
attention of the Pentagon and the press, these small
engagements remain the characteristic "battle" for most GIs.
Short as they usually were, these small battles could be
costly indeed. Most U.S. casualties occurred during the
first few minutes of a fight, before the U.S. unit could
bring supporting artillery aircraft to bear on the enemy.
The head of the MACV operations center, Brigadier General
J.R. Chaisson, estimated that in engagements in the rugged,
jungle-covered mountains of the central highlands, it was
not unusual for a U.S. company to sustain twenty to fifty
casualties in the first few minutes of contact.
In popular culture the Vietnam veteran is almost always
portrayed as a man (never a woman) who spent most of his
time in the jungle confronting the elusive Viet Cong; a man
who had experienced many terrifying and tragic events in the
course of frequent combat and now suffers from some sort of
post-traumatic stress disorder. Given this widely accepted
image, it may come as a surprise to your students that the
majority of GIs who served in Vietnam were seldom, if ever,
in direct contact with the enemy. What proportion of men
actually experienced combat in the television sense is hard
to measure exactly. One method is to count the percentage
serving in maneuver battalions. A maneuver battalion is a
combat unit of battalion size, usually infantry, armored
cavalry tanks, or mechanized infantry, that is able to move
under its own resources and engage the enemy with its
organic weapons. In 1968, the U.S. had 112 maneuver
battalions, and Department of Defense figures showed 29
percent of total Army personnel in Vietnam and 34 percent of
the Marines as serving in maneuver battalions.
The large majority of GIs who did not operate in the field
served as supply, service, or administrative troops
stationed in or near one of the dozen-odd American base
complexes such as Quang Tri and Dong Ha in the north near
the DMZ, Phu Bai near Hue, Da Nang, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, and
Cam Ranh Bay along the central coast, and the Saigon-Bien
Hoa complex, the largest of all. All were located near large
airfield or port facilities and housed upwards of 10,000
U.S. troops.
In general, the larger the base or headquarters, the greater
were the amenities. Troops at the major installations often
enjoyed hot food, electricity, hot showers, a club, athletic
facilities, movies, and plenty of beer. Many clubs were air-
conditioned, and the larger ones featured dining rooms where
hamburgers, French fries, fried chicken, or steak were
always available.
This is not to imply that GIs "in the rear" had a wonderful
time--despite the derisive and contemptuous comments to that
effect by troops in the field. Most men in service units
worked hard at mind-numbing jobs 10 to 12 hours a day, seven
days a week. The heat, insects, blowing dust, flooding and
seas of mud during the rainy season were experienced by
soldiers in all types of jobs. There was also the
disquieting understanding that no place and no job was
completely safe.
"You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and
still know that your safety was provisional; that early
death, blindness, loss of legs, arms, or balls, major and
lasting disfigurement-- the whole rotten deal--could come in
on the freaky fluky as easily in the so-called expected
ways," the reporter Michael Herr wrote, "the roads were
mined, the trails booby-trapped, satchel charges and
grenades blew up jeeps and movie theaters, the VC got work
inside all the camps as shoe-shine boys and laundresses and
honey-dippers; they'd starch your fatigues and burn your s--
- and then go home and mortar your area. Saigon and Cholon
and Da Nang held such hostile vibes that you felt you were
dry-sniped every time someone looked at you."[1]
For the minority of GIs serving in combat units in the
field, life was not safe at all. Although officials in
Washington were fond of pointing out that the casualty rate
of American forces in Vietnam was considerably lower than in
World War II and Korea, this had far more to do with the
larger percentage of personnel in support units and the
availability of improved medical care than with any
differences in the intensity of combat. Men in maneuver
battalions, the units that actually did the fighting,
continued to run about the same chance of death or injury as
their older relatives who had fought in Korea or in the
Pacific. Indeed, during the first half of 1968 the overall
Vietnam casualty rate exceeded the overall rate of all
theaters in World War II, while the casualty rates for Army
and marine maneuver battalions was more than four times as
high.
So if we are going to make any sweeping generalizations
about a war that defies generalization, we might say that
the great majority of Vietnam GIs did not spend their time
patrolling or fighting in the mountains, jungles or rice
paddies, but for those who did, the dangers and the costs
were comparable to other twentieth-century American wars.
Like other disasters in American history--the Civil War, the
Great Depression, Pearl Harbor--the Vietnam War inspires
denial, rationalization, and finger-pointing. Americans
don't like stories without happy endings or problems without
solutions. But so as not to end on a completely negative
note, I would like to read a short portion of one of Jan
Herman's dozens of interviews in his Navy Medicine in
Vietnam (McFarland, Oct. 2008):
"I went back to Vietnam in 1997 with a few of the
Marines I knew from that era_. We remembered a village
called Nhi Ha. If you went to Nhi Ha in 1968 you were
going to die. That was guaranteed. [In 1997] the village
was still small but it had an elementary school. Some
kids came out of the school onto a grassy little slope
where we were eating our box lunches. One of the guys in
our group had a bottle of bubble soap. He stood upwind
from the kids. They stood on the grassy slope while Greg
blew bubbles across their faces. As they reached up and
tried to grab the bubbles they screamed with delight.
Watching this, I realized the war was over."
THE ANATOMY OF THE LONG WAR'S FAILINGS
by F. G. Hoffman
What we now sometimes refer to as the Long War began much
earlier than the 9/11 attacks on America. But that day was
seared into our collective national consciousness and
animated our collective response. That sunny morning in
Manhattan marked the second most violent day in U.S.
history, exceeding Pearl Harbor and even D-Day in
fatalities. Only Antietam's bloody wheat fields have
witnessed more carnage in a single day. Since then, our
country has mobilized for a global conflict against
extremism with a multidimensional approach that has relied
heavily on our military forces.
Just what have we accomplished to date in the Long War? Any
ledger is going to identify some clear gains. Our campaign
in Afghanistan quickly toppled the Taliban, and as a result
al Qaeda no longer enjoys any sanctuary in Afghanistan. A
major multinational invasion of Iraq led by the United
States sliced though the remnants of the Iraqi Army and
destroyed Saddam Hussein's regime. We have generated and
exploited a degree of international cooperation and
intelligence sharing--much of it very discrete--to foil
several plots against ourselves or our partners. We have
substantially reduced al Qaeda's infrastructure around the
world, including its leadership, training facilities, and
financial networks. And the nation has begun to shore up our
home defenses. Notably, no similar attacks have occurred
here at home.
But the ledger has both black and red ink. Bin Laden is
alive and apparently well, although al Qaeda is a more
diffuse organization. The core leadership of al Qaeda itself
has probably been weakened, but its cause has been amplified
and a generation of Muslims has been mobilized if not
radicalized.
Afghanistan remains a key campaign in this war. Our initial
campaign was brilliantly conceived by the CIA. An American
force of CIA operatives and special forces aided no more
than 15,000 Afghan troops to drive out some 50,000 Taliban
and foreign fighters in late 2001.[1] But six years later,
Afghanistan remains a troubled land. The Taliban, once
vanquished, is resurging.
Like the early phases in Afghanistan, the early military
operations in Iraq were also conducted in accord with the
U.S. military's preferred style and exploited its
overwhelming conventional military superiority. The early
successes were ephemeral and temporary. The early occupation
of Iraq went well for six months, but then turned sour as
political enemies vied for national and local control. What
Tom Ricks has called "perhaps the worst war plan in American
history" failed to secure victory as defined by our
political leaders. The planning shortfalls helped create the
conditions for the difficult occupation that followed.[2]
For two years, American commanders and diplomats looked for
a way out, and tried to nurture along a weak government in
Baghdad and shift the fight to the slowly developing Iraqi
Army.[3]
The cost for what has been accomplished to date is
completely disproportionate to the limited gains. How did we
get to this point?
ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK
In a highly regarded evaluation of modern military history
entitled Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War
(1990), two noted historians, Eliot Cohen and John Gooch,
defined a useful framework or taxonomy for analyzing
military failures and their institutional origins. This
taxonomy lays out three types or sources of organizational
failure derived from a superb assessment of the
institutional shortcomings that can lead to lost
opportunities and operational defeat.
The first type of failure is the ability to properly
anticipate. Anticipation is a crucial function of military
services during peacetime as they attempt to discern key
trends and the impact of new technologies on the conduct of
war. It requires the ability to look past the last war, and
anticipate where future threats could arise, and what the
ever evolving character of conflict will be in that
scenario. Strategic anticipation is abetted by understanding
the enduring continuities of war, while ruthlessly looking
for potential discontinuities and opportunities.
The second type or source of misfortune is the failure to
learn. The U.S. Navy's failure to learn from Britain's
experiences in World War I or during the Royal Navy's
desperate efforts against the Nazi U-boats in 1940-41 is a
notable example. The Navy was slow to implement convoys
needed to conduct successful antisubmarine warfare. This
resulted in relearning the hard way--in combat--a rather
bloody education.
The final and perhaps most puzzling failure is the inability
to adapt. "Where learning failures have their roots in the
past," Cohen and Gooch stress, "adaptive failures suggest an
inability to handle the changing present."[4] The U.S. Army
Air Corps' insistence that daylight strategic bombing
without fighter cover over Europe during World War II would
materially contribute to the war effort, and its deadly
persistence despite evidence to the contrary over Germany
represents one notable example.[5]
The remainder of this paper will break down these three
sources of misfortune and their relevance to the Long War in
greater detail.
Failure to Anticipate
The failure to anticipate is perhaps the easiest to
understand, as it usually relates to a failure in
intelligence or some sort of strategic surprise. The failure
to anticipate is often abetted by the use or imposition of
false assumptions. These too can be explicit or implied. As
one strategic analyst has noted, "Making assumptions can be
a double edged sword, correct assumptions can minimize
surprise and aid a desired outcome; errant assumptions can
ensnare a nation and its armed forces in the unexpected.
Sometimes assumptions, rather than physical inferiority,
result in fiasco or defeat. The corridors of power are
filled with consequential officials boasting of "slam dunk"
certitude."[6]
The American failures in Iraq and the Long War come from
such assumptions. They also come from a fundamental
misreading in the evolving character of conflict, and an
implicit net assessment that did not consider irregular
adversaries worthy of study. In fact, rather than conduct
serious net assessments, American planners generally
worshipped at the altar of technology and imagined future
conflicts as a mechanistic engineering exercise rather than
a contest of wills with a determined adversary with a
different culture and his own rule book.
For far too long American military planners and civilian
policymakers have imagined future military capabilities
through rose-colored glasses. The Bush administration
embraced the Revolution in Military Affairs argument and
promised to "skip a generation" in military modernization to
exploit precision technology and information systems.[7]
Many if not most of these visions and concepts were not
solving existing and evident military or security problems,
but were simply advancing military revolutions devoid of
political context or historical understanding. They were
also often devoid of any opponent, reflecting a rather one-
sided misconception about warfare.[8]
The technophiliacs in the Pentagon were abetted by a
military culture that since Vietnam had retreated to a
narrow view of its professional domain. Military culture is
a prime factor in military effectiveness, adaptation, and
innovation.[9] The Army didn't just ignore its Vietnam
experience; it deliberately jettisoned the lessons learned
and chose not to study it, or to determine what actually
worked. Moreover, "it deliberately reconfigured itself
physically as well as intellectually only to fight major
war."[10]
The combination of civilian policymakers and a narrow
military conception of its professional jurisdiction set the
stage for serial failures in anticipation in the run-ups to
both Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in the fall
of 2002 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. These
include failures to anticipate al Qaeda's resilience in
battle and its ability to elude capture in Afghanistan; the
extensive timelines and costs of reconstruction in
Afghanistan and Iraq; the long-term implications of its
military/kinetic approach against the broader Muslim
community and well as potential allies; the effect of its
poor strategic communications and public diplomacy
resources; the decrepit nature of Iraq's infrastructure and
its implications for post-conflict stability; the need to
secure Iraq's critical infrastructure from damage or to
secure its vast stocks of conventional military arms and
munitions; the need for comprehensive guidance for the
detention, control, and interrogation of large numbers of
Iraqis; how improper interrogation techniques would
undermine U.S. moral authority and undercut its standing
internationally and its legitimacy in Iraq; and the
implications of a de-Baathification policy or the impact of
the dissolution of the Iraqi army.
Failure to Learn
Each of the above failures of anticipation were ultimately
compounded by failures to learn. Even when one fails to
anticipate problems, it is usually beneficial to recognize a
problem when it arises and immediately seek out historical
precedents to compress the learning curve. It is always
better to use the experience of others, if only to minimize
losses. History is our best source of professional
experience, and as General Mattis of the Marines once noted,
it provides a professional edge to those willing to invest
the time. To simply improvise out of ignorance, "by filling
body bags as we sort out what works" is an act of
incompetence.[11] With thousands of years of historical
knowledge before them, our military has no excuse not to
have made better use of its storehouse of history.
These lessons were quite accessible to American policymakers
and military planners. But the Army and Marines did not make
this portion of the conflict spectrum a focus of effort.
"It's not unfair to say," Dr. John Nagl has observed, "that
in 2003 most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil
War then they did about counterinsurgency."[12] Thus, in
Iraq and Afghanistan, our forces relearned irregular war the
hard way--in combat.
The basic tenets of counterinsurgency warfare can be
captured by a set of principles or better yet by a
collection of best practices. A number of Americans have
produced sets based off of historical case studies and
vetted by a variety of counterinsurgency experts.[13] These
best practices include the following:
1. Integrated Civil-Military mechanisms. How all
government agencies were coordinated, either under the
command of a single individual or if "unity of effort"
was gained by overall campaign plans and coordination
committees.
2. Governance/Political Reforms. The degree to which
government or political reforms were instituted to
counter weaknesses or enhance credibility of the state.
3. Socio-Economic Services. The degree to which social
development and economic projects were employed to
better support the local civilian population.
4. Integrated Intelligence. The degree to which special
intelligence organs were constructed or existing
agencies integrated to deal with the insurgency.
5. Special Units for Foreign Internal Defense. The
degree to which special units or local indigenous units
were created as counters to the insurgents.
6. Unique Military Training. The degree to which the
counterinsurgent forces are uniquely trained to deal
with an incipient or full-blown insurgency.
7. Information Operations. How the counterinsurgency
employed psychological operations to isolate the
insurgents, to degrade their morale, to minimize their
accomplishments or promote the government's themes.
8. Population Control. How the civilian population was
isolated from the insurgents through security,
identification cards, barriers or forced relocation and
reestablishment into safer and cordoned centers.
9. Resource Control. This factor accounts for efforts to
limit or isolate the insurgents from food, weapons or
other forms of support.
10. Discriminate Force. The degree to which
counterinsurgent forces limit the use of military power
to the minimal degree necessary to avoid antagonizing
the local population and to preclude collateral damage
being exploited as propaganda.
The literature suggests a high correlation between all the
best practices and operational success. When governments and
their supporting allies and partners used these elements as
key components of their overall campaign, they were
generally successful. The same is true in Iraq. Regrettably,
too many U.S. commanders were not familiar with these
practices. Only a few officers understood this mode of
conflict and this aspect of their profession. Population-
centric and kinetically disciplined operations were
successfully implemented by then Major General David
Petraeus in Mosul in 2003 and in Tal Afar by the 3rd Armored
Combat Regiment later in 2005.[14]
In almost all cases, some sort of learning curve was
evident, and eventually policymakers and military leaders
reassessed themselves and made numerous strategic or
operational changes. Some adapted faster than others. Those
who ignored history, continued to underestimate the
opponent, and failed to learn from the experience of others
fared much worse.
The failure to learn is quite understandable if you think of
the U.S. military culture. For several decades, thanks in
large part to lingering attitudes from the Vietnam War,
irregular warfare has been an intellectual and strategic
orphan in U.S. professional military institutions. The heavy
cost of both wars is the price paid for ignoring known
historical lessons and for a narrow military cultural prism
that constrained U.S. strategic and operational planning and
the intellectual readiness of our Officer Corps.
Failure to Adapt
The final factor in evaluating military failures involves
operational adaptation. Adaptation is the ability "to handle
the changing present" and the interactive nature of war.
Strategic and operational adaptation is a key element in
warfare, one often retarded by ideological policies or by
military cultures that fail to recognize how critical
assumptions in prewar planning have been proven to be false
on the battlefield.
The velocity of organizational learning and adaptation is
important in insurgencies. The U.S. military has made a
number of adaptations in its approach to these conflicts, in
how they prepare for them, and for how they train, education
and organize their forces:
* The military has moved from ad hoc headquarters to
robustly staffed structures to better coordinate the
comprehensive activities they are managing with the Iraqis
and with NATO.
* Military Transition Teams (MTTs) and Provincial
Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) have been formed and employed in
both Iraq and Afghanistan to assist in training indigenous
personnel and to provide development and economic assistance
at lower levels.
* There have been substantial changes to the training and
educational base to better prepare U.S. service members for
irregular warfare.
* The Services have stood up a variety of special
cultural and language programs, and centers of excellence
for the study of culture, for counterinsurgency, and for
stability operations.
* The Army and Marines have adapted their forces to
increase the skills sets that are of greater salience in
these kinds of war (intelligence personnel, translators and
interrogators, explosive ordnance personnel, and military
policemen, civil affairs specialists and information or
psychological operations experts). But both the Army and
Marines have bureaucratically resisted innovative
organizational structures dedicated to preventing or
prevailing in irregular warfare.[15]
* Probably the most significant shift was the
intellectual surge produced by the development and
promulgation of an updated counterinsurgency doctrine.[16]
Adaptation, however, is not yet complete. While the Army and
the Marine Corps have seen changes in their structures, and
more substantively in their training systems, the Air Force
is still mulling over what it should do. We still lack the
non-military personnel and skill sets from the rest of the
U.S. government, although steps are being taken to increase
the size of the Foreign Service and establish a Civilian
Response Force. The State Department has also stood up a
cell to improve cross-agency crisis planning, but the
ability of the National Security Council and the broader
national security community to develop coherent strategic
and operational plans for protracted complex contingencies
remains a subject of numerous studies and
recommendations.[17]
These are merely operational forms of adaptation. Many were
obvious after 2004 but were only eventually implemented
after trial and error. This compounded the failure to
anticipate and learn.
The more substantial adaptation was the shift in strategy
that was approved in late 2006 and executed in 2007 in Iraq.
At some point, members of President Bush's NSC staff,
energized by external criticisms and the media and the worst
public opinion in U.S. presidential history, started looking
for a new strategy. After the better part of a year of
various reviews and external study groups, the
administration finally settled on a shift in leadership in
the Pentagon and in theater. It also crafted a change in
priorities and operational focal points, shifting from
training Iraqi forces to a population-centric approach that
put "boots on the ground" in their neighborhoods.
Ultimately, President Bush elected to endorse the strategy
shift and the manpower resources to support it. This is
often referred to now as the "surge strategy." This approach
is founded on best practices and principles that should have
been employed in 2004.[18] Thanks to the combined leadership
of Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno and then
Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the strategy was actually carried
out. They made a critical situation more palatable in Iraq,
and the turnaround they created will be studied for many
decades to come.
CONCLUSION
In their multilevel taxonomy, Cohen and Gooch noted that the
presence of two kinds of misfortune can produce what they
called "aggregate failures." These are usually the result of
anticipatory and learning failures. However, when all three
kinds of failure simultaneously happen, it is usually
catastrophic. Catastrophic failure is most often fatal to
nations. Fortunately, a catastrophic failure in the Long War
has been averted by the painfully slow adaptation of
American strategy and implementing tactics. The sclerotic
American strategy process reacted to several years of
diminishing results and rising criticism. Key individuals
with fortitude, intellectual capacity, and an eye for
opportunity were placed in charge.
Continued adaptation in institutions, processes and human
capital remain critical if the United States and its allies
are to ultimately prevail. Yet, the issue is still in doubt.
Whether adaptation and innovation will be locked in is being
contested in the Pentagon, and only time will tell if
Secretary Gates is successful in adapting long-held mindsets
in the armed forces.[19]
History teaches us that rigorous study of the past,
questioning received wisdom and reconsidering assumptions
are the best security against catastrophic failure.
What we now sometimes refer to as the Long War began much
earlier than the 9/11 attacks on America. But that day was
seared into our collective national consciousness and
animated our collective response. That sunny morning in
Manhattan marked the second most violent day in U.S.
history, exceeding Pearl Harbor and even D-Day in
fatalities. Only Antietam's bloody wheat fields have
witnessed more carnage in a single day. Since then, our
country has mobilized for a global conflict against
extremism with a multidimensional approach that has relied
heavily on our military forces.
Just what have we accomplished to date in the Long War? Any
ledger is going to identify some clear gains. Our campaign
in Afghanistan quickly toppled the Taliban, and as a result
al Qaeda no longer enjoys any sanctuary in Afghanistan. A
major multinational invasion of Iraq led by the United
States sliced though the remnants of the Iraqi Army and
destroyed Saddam Hussein's regime. We have generated and
exploited a degree of international cooperation and
intelligence sharing--much of it very discrete--to foil
several plots against ourselves or our partners. We have
substantially reduced al Qaeda's infrastructure around the
world, including its leadership, training facilities, and
financial networks. And the nation has begun to shore up our
home defenses. Notably, no similar attacks have occurred
here at home.
But the ledger has both black and red ink. Bin Laden is
alive and apparently well, although al Qaeda is a more
diffuse organization. The core leadership of al Qaeda itself
has probably been weakened, but its cause has been amplified
and a generation of Muslims has been mobilized if not
radicalized.
Afghanistan remains a key campaign in this war. Our initial
campaign was brilliantly conceived by the CIA. An American
force of CIA operatives and special forces aided no more
than 15,000 Afghan troops to drive out some 50,000 Taliban
and foreign fighters in late 2001.[1] But six years later,
Afghanistan remains a troubled land. The Taliban, once
vanquished, is resurging.
Like the early phases in Afghanistan, the early military
operations in Iraq were also conducted in accord with the
U.S. military's preferred style and exploited its
overwhelming conventional military superiority. The early
successes were ephemeral and temporary. The early occupation
of Iraq went well for six months, but then turned sour as
political enemies vied for national and local control. What
Tom Ricks has called "perhaps the worst war plan in American
history" failed to secure victory as defined by our
political leaders. The planning shortfalls helped create the
conditions for the difficult occupation that followed.[2]
For two years, American commanders and diplomats looked for
a way out, and tried to nurture along a weak government in
Baghdad and shift the fight to the slowly developing Iraqi
Army.[3]
The cost for what has been accomplished to date is
completely disproportionate to the limited gains. How did we
get to this point?
ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK
In a highly regarded evaluation of modern military history
entitled Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War
(1990), two noted historians, Eliot Cohen and John Gooch,
defined a useful framework or taxonomy for analyzing
military failures and their institutional origins. This
taxonomy lays out three types or sources of organizational
failure derived from a superb assessment of the
institutional shortcomings that can lead to lost
opportunities and operational defeat.
The first type of failure is the ability to properly
anticipate. Anticipation is a crucial function of military
services during peacetime as they attempt to discern key
trends and the impact of new technologies on the conduct of
war. It requires the ability to look past the last war, and
anticipate where future threats could arise, and what the
ever evolving character of conflict will be in that
scenario. Strategic anticipation is abetted by understanding
the enduring continuities of war, while ruthlessly looking
for potential discontinuities and opportunities.
The second type or source of misfortune is the failure to
learn. The U.S. Navy's failure to learn from Britain's
experiences in World War I or during the Royal Navy's
desperate efforts against the Nazi U-boats in 1940-41 is a
notable example. The Navy was slow to implement convoys
needed to conduct successful antisubmarine warfare. This
resulted in relearning the hard way--in combat--a rather
bloody education.
The final and perhaps most puzzling failure is the inability
to adapt. "Where learning failures have their roots in the
past," Cohen and Gooch stress, "adaptive failures suggest an
inability to handle the changing present."[4] The U.S. Army
Air Corps' insistence that daylight strategic bombing
without fighter cover over Europe during World War II would
materially contribute to the war effort, and its deadly
persistence despite evidence to the contrary over Germany
represents one notable example.[5]
The remainder of this paper will break down these three
sources of misfortune and their relevance to the Long War in
greater detail.
Failure to Anticipate
The failure to anticipate is perhaps the easiest to
understand, as it usually relates to a failure in
intelligence or some sort of strategic surprise. The failure
to anticipate is often abetted by the use or imposition of
false assumptions. These too can be explicit or implied. As
one strategic analyst has noted, "Making assumptions can be
a double edged sword, correct assumptions can minimize
surprise and aid a desired outcome; errant assumptions can
ensnare a nation and its armed forces in the unexpected.
Sometimes assumptions, rather than physical inferiority,
result in fiasco or defeat. The corridors of power are
filled with consequential officials boasting of "slam dunk"
certitude."[6]
The American failures in Iraq and the Long War come from
such assumptions. They also come from a fundamental
misreading in the evolving character of conflict, and an
implicit net assessment that did not consider irregular
adversaries worthy of study. In fact, rather than conduct
serious net assessments, American planners generally
worshipped at the altar of technology and imagined future
conflicts as a mechanistic engineering exercise rather than
a contest of wills with a determined adversary with a
different culture and his own rule book.
For far too long American military planners and civilian
policymakers have imagined future military capabilities
through rose-colored glasses. The Bush administration
embraced the Revolution in Military Affairs argument and
promised to "skip a generation" in military modernization to
exploit precision technology and information systems.[7]
Many if not most of these visions and concepts were not
solving existing and evident military or security problems,
but were simply advancing military revolutions devoid of
political context or historical understanding. They were
also often devoid of any opponent, reflecting a rather one-
sided misconception about warfare.[8]
The technophiliacs in the Pentagon were abetted by a
military culture that since Vietnam had retreated to a
narrow view of its professional domain. Military culture is
a prime factor in military effectiveness, adaptation, and
innovation.[9] The Army didn't just ignore its Vietnam
experience; it deliberately jettisoned the lessons learned
and chose not to study it, or to determine what actually
worked. Moreover, "it deliberately reconfigured itself
physically as well as intellectually only to fight major
war."[10]
The combination of civilian policymakers and a narrow
military conception of its professional jurisdiction set the
stage for serial failures in anticipation in the run-ups to
both Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in the fall
of 2002 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. These
include failures to anticipate al Qaeda's resilience in
battle and its ability to elude capture in Afghanistan; the
extensive timelines and costs of reconstruction in
Afghanistan and Iraq; the long-term implications of its
military/kinetic approach against the broader Muslim
community and well as potential allies; the effect of its
poor strategic communications and public diplomacy
resources; the decrepit nature of Iraq's infrastructure and
its implications for post-conflict stability; the need to
secure Iraq's critical infrastructure from damage or to
secure its vast stocks of conventional military arms and
munitions; the need for comprehensive guidance for the
detention, control, and interrogation of large numbers of
Iraqis; how improper interrogation techniques would
undermine U.S. moral authority and undercut its standing
internationally and its legitimacy in Iraq; and the
implications of a de-Baathification policy or the impact of
the dissolution of the Iraqi army.
Failure to Learn
Each of the above failures of anticipation were ultimately
compounded by failures to learn. Even when one fails to
anticipate problems, it is usually beneficial to recognize a
problem when it arises and immediately seek out historical
precedents to compress the learning curve. It is always
better to use the experience of others, if only to minimize
losses. History is our best source of professional
experience, and as General Mattis of the Marines once noted,
it provides a professional edge to those willing to invest
the time. To simply improvise out of ignorance, "by filling
body bags as we sort out what works" is an act of
incompetence.[11] With thousands of years of historical
knowledge before them, our military has no excuse not to
have made better use of its storehouse of history.
These lessons were quite accessible to American policymakers
and military planners. But the Army and Marines did not make
this portion of the conflict spectrum a focus of effort.
"It's not unfair to say," Dr. John Nagl has observed, "that
in 2003 most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil
War then they did about counterinsurgency."[12] Thus, in
Iraq and Afghanistan, our forces relearned irregular war the
hard way--in combat.
The basic tenets of counterinsurgency warfare can be
captured by a set of principles or better yet by a
collection of best practices. A number of Americans have
produced sets based off of historical case studies and
vetted by a variety of counterinsurgency experts.[13] These
best practices include the following:
1. Integrated Civil-Military mechanisms. How all
government agencies were coordinated, either under the
command of a single individual or if "unity of effort"
was gained by overall campaign plans and coordination
committees.
2. Governance/Political Reforms. The degree to which
government or political reforms were instituted to
counter weaknesses or enhance credibility of the state.
3. Socio-Economic Services. The degree to which social
development and economic projects were employed to
better support the local civilian population.
4. Integrated Intelligence. The degree to which special
intelligence organs were constructed or existing
agencies integrated to deal with the insurgency.
5. Special Units for Foreign Internal Defense. The
degree to which special units or local indigenous units
were created as counters to the insurgents.
6. Unique Military Training. The degree to which the
counterinsurgent forces are uniquely trained to deal
with an incipient or full-blown insurgency.
7. Information Operations. How the counterinsurgency
employed psychological operations to isolate the
insurgents, to degrade their morale, to minimize their
accomplishments or promote the government's themes.
8. Population Control. How the civilian population was
isolated from the insurgents through security,
identification cards, barriers or forced relocation and
reestablishment into safer and cordoned centers.
9. Resource Control. This factor accounts for efforts to
limit or isolate the insurgents from food, weapons or
other forms of support.
10. Discriminate Force. The degree to which
counterinsurgent forces limit the use of military power
to the minimal degree necessary to avoid antagonizing
the local population and to preclude collateral damage
being exploited as propaganda.
The literature suggests a high correlation between all the
best practices and operational success. When governments and
their supporting allies and partners used these elements as
key components of their overall campaign, they were
generally successful. The same is true in Iraq. Regrettably,
too many U.S. commanders were not familiar with these
practices. Only a few officers understood this mode of
conflict and this aspect of their profession. Population-
centric and kinetically disciplined operations were
successfully implemented by then Major General David
Petraeus in Mosul in 2003 and in Tal Afar by the 3rd Armored
Combat Regiment later in 2005.[14]
In almost all cases, some sort of learning curve was
evident, and eventually policymakers and military leaders
reassessed themselves and made numerous strategic or
operational changes. Some adapted faster than others. Those
who ignored history, continued to underestimate the
opponent, and failed to learn from the experience of others
fared much worse.
The failure to learn is quite understandable if you think of
the U.S. military culture. For several decades, thanks in
large part to lingering attitudes from the Vietnam War,
irregular warfare has been an intellectual and strategic
orphan in U.S. professional military institutions. The heavy
cost of both wars is the price paid for ignoring known
historical lessons and for a narrow military cultural prism
that constrained U.S. strategic and operational planning and
the intellectual readiness of our Officer Corps.
Failure to Adapt
The final factor in evaluating military failures involves
operational adaptation. Adaptation is the ability "to handle
the changing present" and the interactive nature of war.
Strategic and operational adaptation is a key element in
warfare, one often retarded by ideological policies or by
military cultures that fail to recognize how critical
assumptions in prewar planning have been proven to be false
on the battlefield.
The velocity of organizational learning and adaptation is
important in insurgencies. The U.S. military has made a
number of adaptations in its approach to these conflicts, in
how they prepare for them, and for how they train, education
and organize their forces:
* The military has moved from ad hoc headquarters to
robustly staffed structures to better coordinate the
comprehensive activities they are managing with the Iraqis
and with NATO.
* Military Transition Teams (MTTs) and Provincial
Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) have been formed and employed in
both Iraq and Afghanistan to assist in training indigenous
personnel and to provide development and economic assistance
at lower levels.
* There have been substantial changes to the training and
educational base to better prepare U.S. service members for
irregular warfare.
* The Services have stood up a variety of special
cultural and language programs, and centers of excellence
for the study of culture, for counterinsurgency, and for
stability operations.
* The Army and Marines have adapted their forces to
increase the skills sets that are of greater salience in
these kinds of war (intelligence personnel, translators and
interrogators, explosive ordnance personnel, and military
policemen, civil affairs specialists and information or
psychological operations experts). But both the Army and
Marines have bureaucratically resisted innovative
organizational structures dedicated to preventing or
prevailing in irregular warfare.[15]
* Probably the most significant shift was the
intellectual surge produced by the development and
promulgation of an updated counterinsurgency doctrine.[16]
Adaptation, however, is not yet complete. While the Army and
the Marine Corps have seen changes in their structures, and
more substantively in their training systems, the Air Force
is still mulling over what it should do. We still lack the
non-military personnel and skill sets from the rest of the
U.S. government, although steps are being taken to increase
the size of the Foreign Service and establish a Civilian
Response Force. The State Department has also stood up a
cell to improve cross-agency crisis planning, but the
ability of the National Security Council and the broader
national security community to develop coherent strategic
and operational plans for protracted complex contingencies
remains a subject of numerous studies and
recommendations.[17]
These are merely operational forms of adaptation. Many were
obvious after 2004 but were only eventually implemented
after trial and error. This compounded the failure to
anticipate and learn.
The more substantial adaptation was the shift in strategy
that was approved in late 2006 and executed in 2007 in Iraq.
At some point, members of President Bush's NSC staff,
energized by external criticisms and the media and the worst
public opinion in U.S. presidential history, started looking
for a new strategy. After the better part of a year of
various reviews and external study groups, the
administration finally settled on a shift in leadership in
the Pentagon and in theater. It also crafted a change in
priorities and operational focal points, shifting from
training Iraqi forces to a population-centric approach that
put "boots on the ground" in their neighborhoods.
Ultimately, President Bush elected to endorse the strategy
shift and the manpower resources to support it. This is
often referred to now as the "surge strategy." This approach
is founded on best practices and principles that should have
been employed in 2004.[18] Thanks to the combined leadership
of Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno and then
Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the strategy was actually carried
out. They made a critical situation more palatable in Iraq,
and the turnaround they created will be studied for many
decades to come.
CONCLUSION
In their multilevel taxonomy, Cohen and Gooch noted that the
presence of two kinds of misfortune can produce what they
called "aggregate failures." These are usually the result of
anticipatory and learning failures. However, when all three
kinds of failure simultaneously happen, it is usually
catastrophic. Catastrophic failure is most often fatal to
nations. Fortunately, a catastrophic failure in the Long War
has been averted by the painfully slow adaptation of
American strategy and implementing tactics. The sclerotic
American strategy process reacted to several years of
diminishing results and rising criticism. Key individuals
with fortitude, intellectual capacity, and an eye for
opportunity were placed in charge.
Continued adaptation in institutions, processes and human
capital remain critical if the United States and its allies
are to ultimately prevail. Yet, the issue is still in doubt.
Whether adaptation and innovation will be locked in is being
contested in the Pentagon, and only time will tell if
Secretary Gates is successful in adapting long-held mindsets
in the armed forces.[19]
History teaches us that rigorous study of the past,
questioning received wisdom and reconsidering assumptions
are the best security against catastrophic failure.
GULF WAR I
by LTG (Ret) Bernard Trainor
If you tell your class that "Today, we are going to study
the first Persian Gulf War," you will get an unenthusiastic
response. That war took place almost twenty years ago, in
1991. Today's students weren't born yet. To them, it's
ancient history.
And yet Gulf War I was a watershed in American history,
especially American military history. By the time today's
students graduate, the stream of events that was set in
motion by that War will still be affecting America's youth,
who will still be fighting and dying in the deserts and
mountains of the Middle East.
Youngsters who are learning history, and particularly
military history, in today's academic world see it as a
recitation of events almost like a movie script. It starts,
it goes through, and then it ends. It's devoid of drama or
uncertainty. And yet military history has a human dimension
that surpasses any other subject. Human beings are killing
one another. Teachers should try to imbue these events with
some of their drama.
Gulf War I is a case study of the drama. It was a war of
erroneous assumptions and miscalculations on both sides. The
end was full of surprises and disagreements that have stayed
with us to this very day. This was the first major post-Cold
War U.S. military engagement. From it came a new organizing
principle. The U.S. has always had to have organizing
principles. In the 1930s, it was getting out of the
Depression. Then came WWII, the defeat of fascism and the
Japanese. During the Cold War, the organizing principle was
dealing with the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear
war. After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no
organizing principle. Then events in the Middle East took a
turn. Since that time, the United States' organizing
principle has been dealing with the Middle East, with its
many ramifications--fundamental Islam, terrorism,
insurgencies, failed states, WMD. It all starts with the
Kuwait war. But to understand that, it's well to understand
the context of the times.
Through the 1970s, Arab Iraq and Persian Iran both sought
hegemony in their own right, but each was somewhat of a
satellite of one of the two great powers, with the U.S.
supporting the Shah in Iran and the Soviet Union supporting
Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Things changed when the Ayatollah Khomeini came on the scene
in 1979 and there was the Islamic revolution in Iran, which
ousted Shah Reza Pahlavi. Iran under Khomeini turned against
the U.S., which they saw as a supporter of the hated Shah.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was waning as a threat.
In a reversal, the U.S. began to support the Iraqis against
its former friend Iran. Meanwhile, Saddam decided to take
advantage of the weakness he perceived in Iran as a result
of the fall of the Shah and the dissolution of the Iranian
Army to attack across the Euphrates into Iran. This led to a
long, bitter, and enormously costly war that finally came to
an unsatisfactory conclusion with millions of casualties on
both sides.
The war left Saddam badly in debt. He came to see himself as
Saladin in the Arab world, leading the fight against the
hated Persians, and felt that Iraq had borne the brunt of
the fighting. His campaign had been funded largely by war
loans from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Now the bill was coming
due, and the Kuwaitis in particular were anxious to be paid
back. Saddam sought forgiveness of the debt, claiming the
Kuwaitis were ungrateful. Besides, he reasoned, looking for
excuses to get out of paying the debt, Kuwait was not really
a legitimate government, but was carved out of the Iraqi
portion of the Ottoman empire. It was no more than the 14th
of the Iraqi provinces, to Saddam. Moreover, he claimed that
Kuwait was stealing oil from the Iraqi Ramallah oil field by
slant drilling. That may have been true, but it was largely
a pretext.
Saddam was uncertain how the international community would
receive his claim that Iraq was entitled to reclaim Kuwait.
The Arab states interpreted this as mere saber-rattling. As
to the U.S., Saddam called in U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie
for a long conversation about Iraq's complaints against
Kuwait. In the version published by the New York Times,
Glaspie told Saddam the following, which was music to his
ears. "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like
your border disagreement with Kuwait." Saddam heard that the
U.S. would stand clear, interpreting it almost as a green-
light to go ahead with aggression against Kuwait.
The U.S. government was perfectly aware that Saddam was
starting to mass his armies down along the border with
Kuwait. Discussions were held in the Pentagon and NSC on
whether to send a signal to Saddam to deter him. It was
proposed to send some F-15s over to Saudi Arabia and to move
an amphibious task force into the Gulf waters. But the Arab
leaders told us that sending planes or a fleet might be
provocative, so we didn't do it. This, beside Glaspie's
comments, convinced Saddam that the U.S. was not going to
intervene, because if we were really concerned, we would
have deployed some forces to the region signaling him to
back off.
It came as an enormous surprise to the U.S. when Saddam made
his move in August 1990. The Iraqis took the Kuwaiti capital
and then moved toward the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.
The concern in the U.S. was not so much for Kuwait per se
but oil--if Saddam had been able to surprise us as he had in
Kuwait, he might just surprise us and continue on into Saudi
Arabia for its oilfields. Saddam was aware of this and
afraid of the U.S. reaction, so he pulled back from the
border to a line further back. The area in between became no
man's land, and he started to build two unoccupied lines of
defense, one a couple of miles back from the first. While it
was devoid of troops, it became heavily mined, crisscrossed
with barbed wire entanglements and fire trenches.
President George H.W. Bush sent Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin
Powell to talk to the Saudi king and princes to convince
them to allow American forces on Saudi soil. Saudi Arabia is
a holy land, with Mecca and Medina on its ground. Bringing
foreign, Christian infidel forces into the country was a
very big thing to do. Cheney and Powell had difficulty doing
so, but finally their delegation convinced the king that
Iraq really was a threat to his nation and the king acceded
to our request to land our forces, which we began to do. We
flew in aircraft and units of the 82nd Airborne Division. We
put in a Marine regiment in what was known as Operation
Desert Shield.
These forces dug in as a signal to Saddam that he had best
not move against Saudi Arabia (which he had no intention of
doing, although he did come up with contingency plans). But
he had bitten off more than he could chew. He didn't know
the Americans were going to react this way. How would he get
out of this? In the meantime his soldiers started to steal
anything that was moveable in Kuwait.
The idea of getting involved in Kuwait was not very popular
with the American people. We had had the experience of
Beirut in 1983 where we'd gotten a bloody nose and an
embarrassing retreat. There was no desire to repeat the
experience. The Kuwait-Iraqi dispute was perceived in the
eyes of many Americans to be about the oil companies'
interests. But there were three people in Washington who
were of a different view and they controlled the decision
process: President George H.W. Bush, Secretary James Baker,
and Brent Scowcroft, the national security advisor.
(Officials like Cheney and Powell were on the periphery.)
The troika was determined to force Saddam to back down. But
they could not use force unless a coalition could be built
to support direct action--not only a foreign coalition, but
a bipartisan American coalition. They would first build up
support abroad and then focus on the American people, able
to say to them "See, the international community supports
our efforts, you should, too."
President Bush worked the outside world and succeeded in
gaining support. The UN passed resolutions condemning the
Iraqis and told them to withdraw. Once this international
community had been built, and it was clear that even Arab
states would join a multinational coalition army to face the
Iraqis, President Bush went to the Congress to get American
support for any military action that he might deem
necessary. When it came to giving the President the right to
use military force, it came down to a 52-47 vote in the
Senate on January 12, and 250-183 in the House, which was
pretty close. So the idea that the American people
enthusiastically supported the war was suspect.
Even within the DoD and Pentagon, there was great
disagreement over how to deal with the Iraqi threat. Cheney
was a hawk, and felt we had to do something about the
invasion of Kuwait. Powell disagreed, arguing that Kuwait
wasn't worth the life of one American soldier. He proposed
drawing the "line in the sand" at the border of Saudi
Arabia; if the Iraqis crossed it we'd fight; otherwise we
wouldn't. Cheney told Powell he was not reading the
president very well; Bush had decided that Iraq must be
forced from Kuwait, by force, if needed.
Initially, the American forces rushed to Saudi Arabia in
August under were small. But the build-up had started and
eventually reached half-million troops, backed by an awesome
array of air and sea power with the latest in modern weapons
and technology.
Saddam made the terrible miscalculation in challenging the
U.S., which at that time had a formidable army that was
"unemployed"--i.e. the Cold War was ending, leaving us with
a big army in Europe with no one to fight. We sent our
forces from Germany and from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia not to
only defend that kingdom but to prepare for an assault on
the Iraqi army in Kuwait if it did not withdraw. So it was
not a very smart move on Saddam's part to invade Iraq at
this particular time.
The UN sanctions and resolutions were taken, but nothing was
happening in Kuwait to convince the president and the
coalition that they wouldn't have to resort to force to
expel Saddam. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev sent
Yevgeni Primikov, his foreign minister, to Iraq to advise
Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait, but Saddam wasn't convinced
the Americans would do more than drop some bombs, if that.
Knowing that the American public was casualty-averse, he did
not believe the U.S. had the stomach for war. After all, it
had pulled out of Vietnam and Beirut after some blood was
shed. He also believed that in the long run, the Soviet
Union and the international community would deter the U.S.
from attacking. He was adamant about remaining in Kuwait.
Once again, he miscalculated.
There were Cassandras here in the U.S. The Iraqi Army had
fought the Iranians for eight years and was battle-hardened,
they held. We were sending into war a relatively untested,
post-Vietnam all-volunteer force whose quality was unknown.
There were dire predictions of American casualties in the
range of 10,000 during the first 24 hours. Americans were
nervous about liberating Kuwait by force.
In the White House, there was certainty of a swift victory,
but concern about Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear
weapons programs. There was abundant evidence of very active
Iraqi programs aimed at developing those weapons. This was
fully acknowledged by the international community. We knew
of two particular sites where the Iraqis had nuclear weapons
development sites: al Qaim and al Tuwaitha.
We wanted to see Saddam withdraw, but didn't believe he
would. Therefore we would invade and drive him out by
defeating his field army in Kuwait. The assumption was that
he would then probably be overthrown by an internal military
coup, The Administration wanted a regime change, but
assuming a coup, there was no need to go to Baghdad to oust
the Iraqi president. Indeed, the UN resolution which finally
authorized force restricted the action to the liberation of
Kuwait. It said nothing about regime change in Baghdad.
How were we going to take on the Iraqi field army? The plan
according to General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, was to isolate it in Kuwait and destroy it
with superior firepower and deft maneuver. As was mentioned
earlier, the Iraqis had built up the two lines of defenses.
But they left the open desert in the west undefended. They
did not anticipate an attack coming from that direction. The
plan devised by General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the
coalition forces, was to conduct a prolonged air campaign
against the Iraqi infrastructure--political, economic, and
military. At the same time a multidivisional armored and
mechanized corps would secretly move to the west, blind to
Iraqi intelligence and surveillance. Two Marine divisions in
the east would directly face the Iraqis. When the order to
attack was given, the Marines directly facing the Iraqis
were to engage the Iraqis and hold them in place while as
planned the western task force cut behind them severing
their line of retreat, leaving them isolated and open to
either surrender or destruction.
When the air campaign started on January 17, 1991, the
Iraqis attempted to draw Israel into the fight by launching
Scud missiles at Tel Aviv. Saddam reckoned that the Israelis
would retaliate. This, he reasoned, would outrage the Arab
members of the coalition and undermine it. Once again he had
miscalculated, although, it took great pressure from the
White House to persuade the Israelis to stay out of the
fight.
As the bombing campaign progressed the Saudi government and
CIA conducted a psychological campaign encouraging the Shia
population in southern Iraq, always suppressed by Saddam, to
"Rise up! Throw off your chains! This is your opportunity to
rid yourself of your tormenter! Be prepared for the
Hallelujah day." The hope was that between the destruction
of Saddam's field forces, an uprising by the Shias, and
possibly an army coup it would be the end of Saddam.
Meanwhile, oblivious to an attack from the west, the Iraqis
planned to fight the Americans the same way they had fought
the Iranians. They established sequential defensive
positions behind the unoccupied barrier zone just above the
border with Saudi Arabia. The positions were occupied by the
regular army, backed up by armored Republican Guards
divisions. The Iraqis planned to turn the barrier zone into
a killing zone in which to entrap and inflict intolerable
casualties on the attacking Americans with their abundance
of artillery. Any Americas that made it through the
firestorm would be met by Iraqi infantry and counter
attacked and destroyed by the Republican Guard. It was
exactly what Schwarzkopf hoped they planned to do. His end
run behind them from the west would come as a complete
surprise.
What the Iraqis also hadn't counted upon was the
effectiveness of the prolonged coalition air attacks. Iraq
was being devastated. Saddam decided to seize the initiative
and start the ground war. He would make Schwarzkopf react to
a provocation and draw the Americans into a premature
counterattack. To do this, at the end of January, he sent a
mechanized task force south across the border into Saudi
Arabia to the seaport town of al Khafji, which had been
evacuated of civilians. The town was defended by a small
Saudi Arabian force backed up by Americans some miles to the
south. Saddam planned to bait the Americans.
The Iraqis succeeded in taking Khafji without difficulty,
but Schwarzkopf reacted, not with ground forces, but with
air power. Saddam had taken the potency of our air power
into account, but had equipped his forces liberally with
air-defense weapons. He was convinced that he could provide
an air defense bubble over his forces that would drive off
the Americans. He was wrong. The mechanized corps that went
into Khafji was devastated by air strikes.
Faced with prima facie evidence that his air defenses were
no match for the Americans he radically changed his
strategy. No longer would he attempt to hold Kuwait and
bleed the Americans in a brutal defensive battle - whose
outcome he assumed would lead to a negotiated settlement.
Now he recognized that he was outmatched. He decided that if
and when the Americans attacked he would abandon Kuwait, but
preserve his army, particularly the loyal Republican Guards.
He would conduct a fighting retreat out of Kuwait back into
Iraq.
Not aware of the radical turn of events, the assumption was
made by Schwarzkopf that the Iraqis would defend in place.
Indeed, as we noted, until Khafji, that's exactly what they
had planned to do. Schwarzkopf never understood the
importance of the Khafji battle and made no analysis on what
impact the Iraqi defeat might have on Saddam. He was totally
unaware of the dramatic change in Iraqi strategy. His
attention was focused on monumental enterprise of
positioning multiple divisions in the western desert. He
remained committed to his basic plan to hold the Iraqis in
place and envelop them from the rear. On February 21 Desert
Shield became Desert Storm. The coalition attack went in
against the Iraqi forces as planned, with the Marines
leading the way to engage their attention and lock them in
battle. A day later the surprise corps-sized attack of three
armored and a mechanized division in the west was launched
against the Iraqi flank and rear.
It turned out that the "battle-hardened" Iraqis weren't
battle-hardened at all. They were tired, undernourished, and
under-equipped army, largely unwilling to fight. So many had
deserted earlier that it was a hollow army. (Managing
surrendering Iraqis posed a greater problem than the
fighting.) Some of them were even surrendering to
helicopters and reconnaissance drones There was very little
fighting. The Iraqis gave up all along the line. Some
Republican Guard units fought, but most of the Guard was
under orders to flee back to Iraq and let the regular army
cover their retreat. The unexpected collapse of the Iraqis
upset Schwarzkopf's careful plan. The Marines advanced so
fast that instead of holding fast to the Iraqis so that the
western attack could trap them, the attack acted like a
piston and rapidly drove them north towards escape over the
Iraqi border before the American armor engaged them.
Schwarzkopf also had trouble with the heavy armored corps'
field commander, Lt. Gen. Frederick Franks, a very cautious
man. He didn't realize that the Iraqis were on the run and
that he had an opportunity to go hell-bent across the desert
and cut the Iraqis off. He was moving very slowly so that
all units would be synchronized into a steel fist when they
met the Iraqi Republican Guard. The result was that while
Franks cautiously advanced, over half the Guard units along
with their equipment, were escaping back into Iraq.
Saddam was quickly defeated at an astonishingly low cost to
the coalition. But the idea of destroying his field forces
was gone; the best and most loyal ones had escaped to pose a
subsequent threat.
That was the first undesirable outcome of the war. And while
there was a clamor by some to continue on to Baghdad and
overthrow Saddam, President George Bush rejected the idea
and stuck with the UN mandate, which limited its warrant to
ousting the Iraqis from Kuwait. Secondly, the President did
not want to get tied down in administering the occupation of
Iraq. This decision was to have unfortunate consequences for
the Iraqi Shias just across the border.
With the Iraqis fleeing and coalition forces pummeling them,
it brings us back to Washington and discussions on ending
the war. Bush and his advisors knew that the Iraqis were
thoroughly beaten in the fast moving war, but they had
little idea of the actual situation on the ground. When
asked about it, Schwarzkopf reported that the weather was
bad, it was raining, there were sandstorms, units were
scattered all over the desert. He confessed that didn't
have a clear idea of where each of his units and those of
Saddam's army were located . But, as he boasted in a
televised news conference, the "gate was closed," meaning
that the Iraqi's escape route into their own country was
blocked and the Iraqi army was trapped. Of course that was
not the case as his field commanders knew. Schwarzkopf had
again based his remark on an assumption that was wrong.
Bush presided over an oval-office meeting of his advisers
and Douglas Hurd, Britain' foreign minister, whose country's
forces were fighting next to the Americans. Although there
was utter confusion on the battlefield, it didn't make any
difference. The decision to stop the war was a political,
not a military one. To continue killing already retreating
soldiers was viewed as impolitic and unethical, particularly
in light of media accounts of what was happening on the
highway from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border. Iraqis in
Kuwait city were headed home on the main highway with
everything they could loot from Kuwait. Theirs was an
endless stream of every conveyance that would move headed
north, bumper to bumper. They became a target-rich
environment for American aircraft, which flew up and down,
blasting away at "fish in a barrel." Scenes of devastation
garnered bad press for the administration. This prompted
Colin Powell to step out of his military role and recommend
a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds because the enemy was
already beaten and he was afraid of sullying the American
escutcheon by continued attacks on what was becoming known
as the "Highway of Death." With imperfect intelligence of
the military situation, the President announced a ceasefire
on February 28.
Schwarzkopf was authorized to enter into ceasefire
arrangements with the commanders of the Iraqi field forces,
not realizing that all decisions would actually be made by
Saddam from his Baghdad sanctuary. The general, still
ignorant of the opposing troop dispositions on the
battlefield, announced Safwan, a small community just inside
of Iraq, as the site for the talks. Much to his chagrin he
was told that Safwan was still in Iraqi hands. Under threat
of annihilation, despite the ceasefire, the Iraqis were
finally persuaded to withdraw. Tents were erected for a
meeting between Schwarzkopf, his Arab forces counterpart,
and three Iraqi generals. Here was an opportunity to use
coalition leverage to make substantial demands upon the
Iraqi military under threat of resumed violence. But
Schwarzkopf received no guidance from Washington. His only
concern was cementing the ceasefire on the ground and of
recovering the few coalition captives who had fallen into
Iraqi hands. Instead of dictating terms as a conqueror, he
treated the Iraqi delegation as equals. There were no
draconian options presented. Moreover, Schwarzkopf
acquiesced to an Iraqi request for freedom to use
helicopters for logistic and administrative purposes as the
bridges in southern Iraq had been destroyed.
You will recall that the CIA had been urging the Shias of
southern Iraq to revolt against the regime. With the defeat
of the Iraqi army, they saw their opportunity to do so and
expected American support. But the White House had no
intention of providing it. As far as the President was
concerned the war was over and it was time to come home.
When the Shias rose up, the coalition forces did nothing to
help them even as refugees fled across the border into
Kuwait with horrifying tales. Saddam brutally suppressed the
uprising, notably using armed helicopters to attack the
insurgents. That use was not what Schwarzkopf had in mind
when he authorized the use of helicopters. The Shias were
left to a dismal fate. It was another unfortunate
consequence and a shameful footnote to a notable American
victory.
And so Gulf War I ended. It was marked throughout by a
series of miscalculations and faulty assumptions on both
sides. It turned out to be a precursor for another war in
2003, the results of which are still with us. In 1991 Saddam
remained in power, his Republican Guard was intact, revolt
had been suppressed and his quest for WMD, particularly
nuclear weapons continued--at least temporarily. As
mentioned earlier, we had identified two WMD sites prior to
the war. At its end when UN and IAEA inspectors had access
to Iraq, under provisions of the ceasefire and UN
authorization they found not two but 19 nuclear sites with
39 separate facilities. So there was no question about
Saddam's intent. This was to have a bearing on the events
over the 12 years of sanctions on Iraq and the events
leading up to Gulf War II.
With the war over, the troops came home, many of them were
embarrassed because they saw very little of any fighting.
For most ground troops it was little more than a motor-march
through the desert. Saddam was discredited in much of the
world, but he was a canny survivor and cast himself at home
as a hero of the war. He told the Iraqi people that under
his leadership the Iraqi army had defeated the Americans and
their puppets in the "Mother of All Battles." As proof he
noted that the Americans were defeated in their attempt to
invade Iraq, something an enemy army would have done if it
was victorious. The sacred soil of Iraq was preserved. He
liberally handed out medals and awards to the warriors of
his victorious army. But beneath the bravado, Saddam was
shaken to the core by the performance of his army, the Shia
uprising, and the fear of a coup. All three concerns were to
influence his postwar decisions and the way he would fight
Gulf War II.
If you tell your class that "Today, we are going to study
the first Persian Gulf War," you will get an unenthusiastic
response. That war took place almost twenty years ago, in
1991. Today's students weren't born yet. To them, it's
ancient history.
And yet Gulf War I was a watershed in American history,
especially American military history. By the time today's
students graduate, the stream of events that was set in
motion by that War will still be affecting America's youth,
who will still be fighting and dying in the deserts and
mountains of the Middle East.
Youngsters who are learning history, and particularly
military history, in today's academic world see it as a
recitation of events almost like a movie script. It starts,
it goes through, and then it ends. It's devoid of drama or
uncertainty. And yet military history has a human dimension
that surpasses any other subject. Human beings are killing
one another. Teachers should try to imbue these events with
some of their drama.
Gulf War I is a case study of the drama. It was a war of
erroneous assumptions and miscalculations on both sides. The
end was full of surprises and disagreements that have stayed
with us to this very day. This was the first major post-Cold
War U.S. military engagement. From it came a new organizing
principle. The U.S. has always had to have organizing
principles. In the 1930s, it was getting out of the
Depression. Then came WWII, the defeat of fascism and the
Japanese. During the Cold War, the organizing principle was
dealing with the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear
war. After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no
organizing principle. Then events in the Middle East took a
turn. Since that time, the United States' organizing
principle has been dealing with the Middle East, with its
many ramifications--fundamental Islam, terrorism,
insurgencies, failed states, WMD. It all starts with the
Kuwait war. But to understand that, it's well to understand
the context of the times.
Through the 1970s, Arab Iraq and Persian Iran both sought
hegemony in their own right, but each was somewhat of a
satellite of one of the two great powers, with the U.S.
supporting the Shah in Iran and the Soviet Union supporting
Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Things changed when the Ayatollah Khomeini came on the scene
in 1979 and there was the Islamic revolution in Iran, which
ousted Shah Reza Pahlavi. Iran under Khomeini turned against
the U.S., which they saw as a supporter of the hated Shah.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was waning as a threat.
In a reversal, the U.S. began to support the Iraqis against
its former friend Iran. Meanwhile, Saddam decided to take
advantage of the weakness he perceived in Iran as a result
of the fall of the Shah and the dissolution of the Iranian
Army to attack across the Euphrates into Iran. This led to a
long, bitter, and enormously costly war that finally came to
an unsatisfactory conclusion with millions of casualties on
both sides.
The war left Saddam badly in debt. He came to see himself as
Saladin in the Arab world, leading the fight against the
hated Persians, and felt that Iraq had borne the brunt of
the fighting. His campaign had been funded largely by war
loans from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Now the bill was coming
due, and the Kuwaitis in particular were anxious to be paid
back. Saddam sought forgiveness of the debt, claiming the
Kuwaitis were ungrateful. Besides, he reasoned, looking for
excuses to get out of paying the debt, Kuwait was not really
a legitimate government, but was carved out of the Iraqi
portion of the Ottoman empire. It was no more than the 14th
of the Iraqi provinces, to Saddam. Moreover, he claimed that
Kuwait was stealing oil from the Iraqi Ramallah oil field by
slant drilling. That may have been true, but it was largely
a pretext.
Saddam was uncertain how the international community would
receive his claim that Iraq was entitled to reclaim Kuwait.
The Arab states interpreted this as mere saber-rattling. As
to the U.S., Saddam called in U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie
for a long conversation about Iraq's complaints against
Kuwait. In the version published by the New York Times,
Glaspie told Saddam the following, which was music to his
ears. "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like
your border disagreement with Kuwait." Saddam heard that the
U.S. would stand clear, interpreting it almost as a green-
light to go ahead with aggression against Kuwait.
The U.S. government was perfectly aware that Saddam was
starting to mass his armies down along the border with
Kuwait. Discussions were held in the Pentagon and NSC on
whether to send a signal to Saddam to deter him. It was
proposed to send some F-15s over to Saudi Arabia and to move
an amphibious task force into the Gulf waters. But the Arab
leaders told us that sending planes or a fleet might be
provocative, so we didn't do it. This, beside Glaspie's
comments, convinced Saddam that the U.S. was not going to
intervene, because if we were really concerned, we would
have deployed some forces to the region signaling him to
back off.
It came as an enormous surprise to the U.S. when Saddam made
his move in August 1990. The Iraqis took the Kuwaiti capital
and then moved toward the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.
The concern in the U.S. was not so much for Kuwait per se
but oil--if Saddam had been able to surprise us as he had in
Kuwait, he might just surprise us and continue on into Saudi
Arabia for its oilfields. Saddam was aware of this and
afraid of the U.S. reaction, so he pulled back from the
border to a line further back. The area in between became no
man's land, and he started to build two unoccupied lines of
defense, one a couple of miles back from the first. While it
was devoid of troops, it became heavily mined, crisscrossed
with barbed wire entanglements and fire trenches.
President George H.W. Bush sent Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin
Powell to talk to the Saudi king and princes to convince
them to allow American forces on Saudi soil. Saudi Arabia is
a holy land, with Mecca and Medina on its ground. Bringing
foreign, Christian infidel forces into the country was a
very big thing to do. Cheney and Powell had difficulty doing
so, but finally their delegation convinced the king that
Iraq really was a threat to his nation and the king acceded
to our request to land our forces, which we began to do. We
flew in aircraft and units of the 82nd Airborne Division. We
put in a Marine regiment in what was known as Operation
Desert Shield.
These forces dug in as a signal to Saddam that he had best
not move against Saudi Arabia (which he had no intention of
doing, although he did come up with contingency plans). But
he had bitten off more than he could chew. He didn't know
the Americans were going to react this way. How would he get
out of this? In the meantime his soldiers started to steal
anything that was moveable in Kuwait.
The idea of getting involved in Kuwait was not very popular
with the American people. We had had the experience of
Beirut in 1983 where we'd gotten a bloody nose and an
embarrassing retreat. There was no desire to repeat the
experience. The Kuwait-Iraqi dispute was perceived in the
eyes of many Americans to be about the oil companies'
interests. But there were three people in Washington who
were of a different view and they controlled the decision
process: President George H.W. Bush, Secretary James Baker,
and Brent Scowcroft, the national security advisor.
(Officials like Cheney and Powell were on the periphery.)
The troika was determined to force Saddam to back down. But
they could not use force unless a coalition could be built
to support direct action--not only a foreign coalition, but
a bipartisan American coalition. They would first build up
support abroad and then focus on the American people, able
to say to them "See, the international community supports
our efforts, you should, too."
President Bush worked the outside world and succeeded in
gaining support. The UN passed resolutions condemning the
Iraqis and told them to withdraw. Once this international
community had been built, and it was clear that even Arab
states would join a multinational coalition army to face the
Iraqis, President Bush went to the Congress to get American
support for any military action that he might deem
necessary. When it came to giving the President the right to
use military force, it came down to a 52-47 vote in the
Senate on January 12, and 250-183 in the House, which was
pretty close. So the idea that the American people
enthusiastically supported the war was suspect.
Even within the DoD and Pentagon, there was great
disagreement over how to deal with the Iraqi threat. Cheney
was a hawk, and felt we had to do something about the
invasion of Kuwait. Powell disagreed, arguing that Kuwait
wasn't worth the life of one American soldier. He proposed
drawing the "line in the sand" at the border of Saudi
Arabia; if the Iraqis crossed it we'd fight; otherwise we
wouldn't. Cheney told Powell he was not reading the
president very well; Bush had decided that Iraq must be
forced from Kuwait, by force, if needed.
Initially, the American forces rushed to Saudi Arabia in
August under were small. But the build-up had started and
eventually reached half-million troops, backed by an awesome
array of air and sea power with the latest in modern weapons
and technology.
Saddam made the terrible miscalculation in challenging the
U.S., which at that time had a formidable army that was
"unemployed"--i.e. the Cold War was ending, leaving us with
a big army in Europe with no one to fight. We sent our
forces from Germany and from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia not to
only defend that kingdom but to prepare for an assault on
the Iraqi army in Kuwait if it did not withdraw. So it was
not a very smart move on Saddam's part to invade Iraq at
this particular time.
The UN sanctions and resolutions were taken, but nothing was
happening in Kuwait to convince the president and the
coalition that they wouldn't have to resort to force to
expel Saddam. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev sent
Yevgeni Primikov, his foreign minister, to Iraq to advise
Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait, but Saddam wasn't convinced
the Americans would do more than drop some bombs, if that.
Knowing that the American public was casualty-averse, he did
not believe the U.S. had the stomach for war. After all, it
had pulled out of Vietnam and Beirut after some blood was
shed. He also believed that in the long run, the Soviet
Union and the international community would deter the U.S.
from attacking. He was adamant about remaining in Kuwait.
Once again, he miscalculated.
There were Cassandras here in the U.S. The Iraqi Army had
fought the Iranians for eight years and was battle-hardened,
they held. We were sending into war a relatively untested,
post-Vietnam all-volunteer force whose quality was unknown.
There were dire predictions of American casualties in the
range of 10,000 during the first 24 hours. Americans were
nervous about liberating Kuwait by force.
In the White House, there was certainty of a swift victory,
but concern about Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear
weapons programs. There was abundant evidence of very active
Iraqi programs aimed at developing those weapons. This was
fully acknowledged by the international community. We knew
of two particular sites where the Iraqis had nuclear weapons
development sites: al Qaim and al Tuwaitha.
We wanted to see Saddam withdraw, but didn't believe he
would. Therefore we would invade and drive him out by
defeating his field army in Kuwait. The assumption was that
he would then probably be overthrown by an internal military
coup, The Administration wanted a regime change, but
assuming a coup, there was no need to go to Baghdad to oust
the Iraqi president. Indeed, the UN resolution which finally
authorized force restricted the action to the liberation of
Kuwait. It said nothing about regime change in Baghdad.
How were we going to take on the Iraqi field army? The plan
according to General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, was to isolate it in Kuwait and destroy it
with superior firepower and deft maneuver. As was mentioned
earlier, the Iraqis had built up the two lines of defenses.
But they left the open desert in the west undefended. They
did not anticipate an attack coming from that direction. The
plan devised by General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the
coalition forces, was to conduct a prolonged air campaign
against the Iraqi infrastructure--political, economic, and
military. At the same time a multidivisional armored and
mechanized corps would secretly move to the west, blind to
Iraqi intelligence and surveillance. Two Marine divisions in
the east would directly face the Iraqis. When the order to
attack was given, the Marines directly facing the Iraqis
were to engage the Iraqis and hold them in place while as
planned the western task force cut behind them severing
their line of retreat, leaving them isolated and open to
either surrender or destruction.
When the air campaign started on January 17, 1991, the
Iraqis attempted to draw Israel into the fight by launching
Scud missiles at Tel Aviv. Saddam reckoned that the Israelis
would retaliate. This, he reasoned, would outrage the Arab
members of the coalition and undermine it. Once again he had
miscalculated, although, it took great pressure from the
White House to persuade the Israelis to stay out of the
fight.
As the bombing campaign progressed the Saudi government and
CIA conducted a psychological campaign encouraging the Shia
population in southern Iraq, always suppressed by Saddam, to
"Rise up! Throw off your chains! This is your opportunity to
rid yourself of your tormenter! Be prepared for the
Hallelujah day." The hope was that between the destruction
of Saddam's field forces, an uprising by the Shias, and
possibly an army coup it would be the end of Saddam.
Meanwhile, oblivious to an attack from the west, the Iraqis
planned to fight the Americans the same way they had fought
the Iranians. They established sequential defensive
positions behind the unoccupied barrier zone just above the
border with Saudi Arabia. The positions were occupied by the
regular army, backed up by armored Republican Guards
divisions. The Iraqis planned to turn the barrier zone into
a killing zone in which to entrap and inflict intolerable
casualties on the attacking Americans with their abundance
of artillery. Any Americas that made it through the
firestorm would be met by Iraqi infantry and counter
attacked and destroyed by the Republican Guard. It was
exactly what Schwarzkopf hoped they planned to do. His end
run behind them from the west would come as a complete
surprise.
What the Iraqis also hadn't counted upon was the
effectiveness of the prolonged coalition air attacks. Iraq
was being devastated. Saddam decided to seize the initiative
and start the ground war. He would make Schwarzkopf react to
a provocation and draw the Americans into a premature
counterattack. To do this, at the end of January, he sent a
mechanized task force south across the border into Saudi
Arabia to the seaport town of al Khafji, which had been
evacuated of civilians. The town was defended by a small
Saudi Arabian force backed up by Americans some miles to the
south. Saddam planned to bait the Americans.
The Iraqis succeeded in taking Khafji without difficulty,
but Schwarzkopf reacted, not with ground forces, but with
air power. Saddam had taken the potency of our air power
into account, but had equipped his forces liberally with
air-defense weapons. He was convinced that he could provide
an air defense bubble over his forces that would drive off
the Americans. He was wrong. The mechanized corps that went
into Khafji was devastated by air strikes.
Faced with prima facie evidence that his air defenses were
no match for the Americans he radically changed his
strategy. No longer would he attempt to hold Kuwait and
bleed the Americans in a brutal defensive battle - whose
outcome he assumed would lead to a negotiated settlement.
Now he recognized that he was outmatched. He decided that if
and when the Americans attacked he would abandon Kuwait, but
preserve his army, particularly the loyal Republican Guards.
He would conduct a fighting retreat out of Kuwait back into
Iraq.
Not aware of the radical turn of events, the assumption was
made by Schwarzkopf that the Iraqis would defend in place.
Indeed, as we noted, until Khafji, that's exactly what they
had planned to do. Schwarzkopf never understood the
importance of the Khafji battle and made no analysis on what
impact the Iraqi defeat might have on Saddam. He was totally
unaware of the dramatic change in Iraqi strategy. His
attention was focused on monumental enterprise of
positioning multiple divisions in the western desert. He
remained committed to his basic plan to hold the Iraqis in
place and envelop them from the rear. On February 21 Desert
Shield became Desert Storm. The coalition attack went in
against the Iraqi forces as planned, with the Marines
leading the way to engage their attention and lock them in
battle. A day later the surprise corps-sized attack of three
armored and a mechanized division in the west was launched
against the Iraqi flank and rear.
It turned out that the "battle-hardened" Iraqis weren't
battle-hardened at all. They were tired, undernourished, and
under-equipped army, largely unwilling to fight. So many had
deserted earlier that it was a hollow army. (Managing
surrendering Iraqis posed a greater problem than the
fighting.) Some of them were even surrendering to
helicopters and reconnaissance drones There was very little
fighting. The Iraqis gave up all along the line. Some
Republican Guard units fought, but most of the Guard was
under orders to flee back to Iraq and let the regular army
cover their retreat. The unexpected collapse of the Iraqis
upset Schwarzkopf's careful plan. The Marines advanced so
fast that instead of holding fast to the Iraqis so that the
western attack could trap them, the attack acted like a
piston and rapidly drove them north towards escape over the
Iraqi border before the American armor engaged them.
Schwarzkopf also had trouble with the heavy armored corps'
field commander, Lt. Gen. Frederick Franks, a very cautious
man. He didn't realize that the Iraqis were on the run and
that he had an opportunity to go hell-bent across the desert
and cut the Iraqis off. He was moving very slowly so that
all units would be synchronized into a steel fist when they
met the Iraqi Republican Guard. The result was that while
Franks cautiously advanced, over half the Guard units along
with their equipment, were escaping back into Iraq.
Saddam was quickly defeated at an astonishingly low cost to
the coalition. But the idea of destroying his field forces
was gone; the best and most loyal ones had escaped to pose a
subsequent threat.
That was the first undesirable outcome of the war. And while
there was a clamor by some to continue on to Baghdad and
overthrow Saddam, President George Bush rejected the idea
and stuck with the UN mandate, which limited its warrant to
ousting the Iraqis from Kuwait. Secondly, the President did
not want to get tied down in administering the occupation of
Iraq. This decision was to have unfortunate consequences for
the Iraqi Shias just across the border.
With the Iraqis fleeing and coalition forces pummeling them,
it brings us back to Washington and discussions on ending
the war. Bush and his advisors knew that the Iraqis were
thoroughly beaten in the fast moving war, but they had
little idea of the actual situation on the ground. When
asked about it, Schwarzkopf reported that the weather was
bad, it was raining, there were sandstorms, units were
scattered all over the desert. He confessed that didn't
have a clear idea of where each of his units and those of
Saddam's army were located . But, as he boasted in a
televised news conference, the "gate was closed," meaning
that the Iraqi's escape route into their own country was
blocked and the Iraqi army was trapped. Of course that was
not the case as his field commanders knew. Schwarzkopf had
again based his remark on an assumption that was wrong.
Bush presided over an oval-office meeting of his advisers
and Douglas Hurd, Britain' foreign minister, whose country's
forces were fighting next to the Americans. Although there
was utter confusion on the battlefield, it didn't make any
difference. The decision to stop the war was a political,
not a military one. To continue killing already retreating
soldiers was viewed as impolitic and unethical, particularly
in light of media accounts of what was happening on the
highway from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border. Iraqis in
Kuwait city were headed home on the main highway with
everything they could loot from Kuwait. Theirs was an
endless stream of every conveyance that would move headed
north, bumper to bumper. They became a target-rich
environment for American aircraft, which flew up and down,
blasting away at "fish in a barrel." Scenes of devastation
garnered bad press for the administration. This prompted
Colin Powell to step out of his military role and recommend
a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds because the enemy was
already beaten and he was afraid of sullying the American
escutcheon by continued attacks on what was becoming known
as the "Highway of Death." With imperfect intelligence of
the military situation, the President announced a ceasefire
on February 28.
Schwarzkopf was authorized to enter into ceasefire
arrangements with the commanders of the Iraqi field forces,
not realizing that all decisions would actually be made by
Saddam from his Baghdad sanctuary. The general, still
ignorant of the opposing troop dispositions on the
battlefield, announced Safwan, a small community just inside
of Iraq, as the site for the talks. Much to his chagrin he
was told that Safwan was still in Iraqi hands. Under threat
of annihilation, despite the ceasefire, the Iraqis were
finally persuaded to withdraw. Tents were erected for a
meeting between Schwarzkopf, his Arab forces counterpart,
and three Iraqi generals. Here was an opportunity to use
coalition leverage to make substantial demands upon the
Iraqi military under threat of resumed violence. But
Schwarzkopf received no guidance from Washington. His only
concern was cementing the ceasefire on the ground and of
recovering the few coalition captives who had fallen into
Iraqi hands. Instead of dictating terms as a conqueror, he
treated the Iraqi delegation as equals. There were no
draconian options presented. Moreover, Schwarzkopf
acquiesced to an Iraqi request for freedom to use
helicopters for logistic and administrative purposes as the
bridges in southern Iraq had been destroyed.
You will recall that the CIA had been urging the Shias of
southern Iraq to revolt against the regime. With the defeat
of the Iraqi army, they saw their opportunity to do so and
expected American support. But the White House had no
intention of providing it. As far as the President was
concerned the war was over and it was time to come home.
When the Shias rose up, the coalition forces did nothing to
help them even as refugees fled across the border into
Kuwait with horrifying tales. Saddam brutally suppressed the
uprising, notably using armed helicopters to attack the
insurgents. That use was not what Schwarzkopf had in mind
when he authorized the use of helicopters. The Shias were
left to a dismal fate. It was another unfortunate
consequence and a shameful footnote to a notable American
victory.
And so Gulf War I ended. It was marked throughout by a
series of miscalculations and faulty assumptions on both
sides. It turned out to be a precursor for another war in
2003, the results of which are still with us. In 1991 Saddam
remained in power, his Republican Guard was intact, revolt
had been suppressed and his quest for WMD, particularly
nuclear weapons continued--at least temporarily. As
mentioned earlier, we had identified two WMD sites prior to
the war. At its end when UN and IAEA inspectors had access
to Iraq, under provisions of the ceasefire and UN
authorization they found not two but 19 nuclear sites with
39 separate facilities. So there was no question about
Saddam's intent. This was to have a bearing on the events
over the 12 years of sanctions on Iraq and the events
leading up to Gulf War II.
With the war over, the troops came home, many of them were
embarrassed because they saw very little of any fighting.
For most ground troops it was little more than a motor-march
through the desert. Saddam was discredited in much of the
world, but he was a canny survivor and cast himself at home
as a hero of the war. He told the Iraqi people that under
his leadership the Iraqi army had defeated the Americans and
their puppets in the "Mother of All Battles." As proof he
noted that the Americans were defeated in their attempt to
invade Iraq, something an enemy army would have done if it
was victorious. The sacred soil of Iraq was preserved. He
liberally handed out medals and awards to the warriors of
his victorious army. But beneath the bravado, Saddam was
shaken to the core by the performance of his army, the Shia
uprising, and the fear of a coup. All three concerns were to
influence his postwar decisions and the way he would fight
Gulf War II.
Monday, June 15, 2009
What independence?
Outside Looking In By Jerick Aguilar Updated June 14, 2009 12:00 AM
I usually think of the next topic to write for my column a week or two before submitting the final draft to my editor. But it just occurred to me that June 12 is our Independence Day and that it is timely to write something about it. I should have remembered it earlier since I was part of celebrating it last year while I was still in the Middle East. I was asked to host SPY’s (“Samahan ng mga Pilipino sa Yemen,” the Filipino Association in Yemen) annual “Araw ng Kalayaan” (Day of Independence) party at the Sheraton Hotel in the capital Sana’a.
I remember emailing pictures of the event to my family and close friends and unusually greeting them a “Happy Independence Day” as an excuse to boast my fifteen minutes (okay, seconds) of fame in a place that I had just relocated to less than two months before the actual event. They are used to something like this from me so very few bothered to give me a reaffirmation, or make that, a reply. But I received a different response from a kababata (childhood friend) of mine. He basically wrote, “Happy Independence Day to you, too! Although I guess we haven’t really achieved true independence yet, have we? Independence is not just about civil liberties but also independence from poverty, hunger, and abuse.”
He did hit the spot. So it begs to ask the questions, “Are we really independent?,” and, “Is there truly a reason to celebrate?”
As a matter of trivia, June 12, 1898 was our day of independence from Spain but not from the United States. The Spanish government sold our country to the Americans in the same year for $20 million so we were never really independent. We finally became sovereign on July 4, 1946 when Uncle Sam relinquished its authority over our islands (and we – fortunately or unfortunately – missed out on being the 51st state of America).
Our Independence Day was actually observed every year on this day until 1964 when nationalist politicians urged then President Diosdado Macapagal to sign into law our first day of sovereignty from a foreign entity, June 12, as our official day of independence.
But are we in fact independent from the United States? I have lived in America for a number of years and I have met conspiracy theorists who obviously believe otherwise. They say that the Philippines has an ideal geo-political location so the American government will never allow us to eclipse our developing country status and become less dependent on their aid, hence, less cooperative to their needs. In other words, our entire political and economic direction is not only within our hands. To them (and I, at some level, agree), our government is a puppet on a string with both the US Congress and White House moving some, if not the whole of, its parts. They argue that we are America’s 100-percent ally in the region so they cannot afford to lose us by ensuring that they have control over the key players in the current administration (and even in business).
Are we also independent from poverty? The latest poverty statistics in 2006 show that at least three out of 10 Filipinos live below the annual poverty threshold of P15,057. In other words, a person is considered poor in the Philippines if he or she earns only P41.25 per day. Assuming this person spends all of the money on food (ignoring the other basic necessities of shelter and clothing), this means that he or she can survive with a measly P13.75 per meal per day. But a cup of rice nowadays already costs P7. So even if he or she skips breakfast, this “thin” person only has a few pesos left to buy “ulam” (main dish) and most likely has to drink tap water to prevent himself or herself from choking.
In short, the official estimate that 32.9 percent of Filipinos are poor is grossly understated. My doctoral research that computed a realistic poverty threshold (based on the 2000 Family Income and Expenditure Survey data) came up with a figure of around 60 percent. This is not far from the Social Weather Stations’ (SWS, a private nonprofit social research institution) self-rated poverty statistic of 56.5 percent (average of the quarterly results) in the same year.
Hence, majority of Filipinos, and definitely not a third, are still poor. SWS also has statistics on hunger and the figure for February 2007 is 19 percent. This is the proportion of families who answered yes to the question of whether or not they felt hungry at one time or another and had nothing to eat in the last three months.
And are we independent from abuse? The abuse of power, to be exact, like graft and corruption, vote-buying and -rigging, and political dynasties? We have a President who has been accused many times over of being corrupt such as receiving massive kickbacks from the national broadband network agreement with China as well as the Northrail and the Mt. Diwalwal projects. She was also allegedly involved in the fertilizer fund scam as well as the swine scam under the Rural Credit Guarantee Corp. She is even said to give bribes to members of the House to sway them to be at Malacañang’s beck and call.
It is not just the President herself but almost everybody else in our government who arguably takes much more than what they promised to give. Every year, each congressman receives an average of P70 million as pork barrel and each senator, P200 million. I am no mathematician but if they gave a million pesos each to the 53.1 million Filipinos who are “unofficially” poor, then there would be no more poverty (and hunger) in the Philippines. They would also still have a lot of money left to finance projects for themselves and their families, I mean, their constituents. They most probably wouldn’t have to pay for votes anymore in the upcoming elections because the people no longer need the money, but they might have to spend some of it instead on manipulating the election results to their advantage.
With regard to our elections next year, how many more wives of incumbents will run for mayor or governor? Siblings for senator? And children of past and present presidents (and congressmen) for congressman? Yes, our country is a democracy and anyone has the right to enter the realm of politics. But democracy also means the voice of the people so the more people from different families are represented, the louder their voice, and the greater chances of everybody being heard. As they say, “Give chance to others.” So public service or, more appropriately and apparently in the Philippines, power need not be a family affair.
Despite the aforementioned, my kababata (and I) is still hopeful about the Philippines. He believes that we are still a young nation so we have a long way to go. Historically speaking, the Spanish colonized us in 1565 and it took us more than three centuries to be independent from Spain. I just hope that it won’t take that long for our country to be independent from America, poverty, hunger, and the abuse of power. And when that time comes (hopefully in my lifetime), I will always remember this day of independence and have plenty of reasons to celebrate it.
I usually think of the next topic to write for my column a week or two before submitting the final draft to my editor. But it just occurred to me that June 12 is our Independence Day and that it is timely to write something about it. I should have remembered it earlier since I was part of celebrating it last year while I was still in the Middle East. I was asked to host SPY’s (“Samahan ng mga Pilipino sa Yemen,” the Filipino Association in Yemen) annual “Araw ng Kalayaan” (Day of Independence) party at the Sheraton Hotel in the capital Sana’a.
I remember emailing pictures of the event to my family and close friends and unusually greeting them a “Happy Independence Day” as an excuse to boast my fifteen minutes (okay, seconds) of fame in a place that I had just relocated to less than two months before the actual event. They are used to something like this from me so very few bothered to give me a reaffirmation, or make that, a reply. But I received a different response from a kababata (childhood friend) of mine. He basically wrote, “Happy Independence Day to you, too! Although I guess we haven’t really achieved true independence yet, have we? Independence is not just about civil liberties but also independence from poverty, hunger, and abuse.”
He did hit the spot. So it begs to ask the questions, “Are we really independent?,” and, “Is there truly a reason to celebrate?”
As a matter of trivia, June 12, 1898 was our day of independence from Spain but not from the United States. The Spanish government sold our country to the Americans in the same year for $20 million so we were never really independent. We finally became sovereign on July 4, 1946 when Uncle Sam relinquished its authority over our islands (and we – fortunately or unfortunately – missed out on being the 51st state of America).
Our Independence Day was actually observed every year on this day until 1964 when nationalist politicians urged then President Diosdado Macapagal to sign into law our first day of sovereignty from a foreign entity, June 12, as our official day of independence.
But are we in fact independent from the United States? I have lived in America for a number of years and I have met conspiracy theorists who obviously believe otherwise. They say that the Philippines has an ideal geo-political location so the American government will never allow us to eclipse our developing country status and become less dependent on their aid, hence, less cooperative to their needs. In other words, our entire political and economic direction is not only within our hands. To them (and I, at some level, agree), our government is a puppet on a string with both the US Congress and White House moving some, if not the whole of, its parts. They argue that we are America’s 100-percent ally in the region so they cannot afford to lose us by ensuring that they have control over the key players in the current administration (and even in business).
Are we also independent from poverty? The latest poverty statistics in 2006 show that at least three out of 10 Filipinos live below the annual poverty threshold of P15,057. In other words, a person is considered poor in the Philippines if he or she earns only P41.25 per day. Assuming this person spends all of the money on food (ignoring the other basic necessities of shelter and clothing), this means that he or she can survive with a measly P13.75 per meal per day. But a cup of rice nowadays already costs P7. So even if he or she skips breakfast, this “thin” person only has a few pesos left to buy “ulam” (main dish) and most likely has to drink tap water to prevent himself or herself from choking.
In short, the official estimate that 32.9 percent of Filipinos are poor is grossly understated. My doctoral research that computed a realistic poverty threshold (based on the 2000 Family Income and Expenditure Survey data) came up with a figure of around 60 percent. This is not far from the Social Weather Stations’ (SWS, a private nonprofit social research institution) self-rated poverty statistic of 56.5 percent (average of the quarterly results) in the same year.
Hence, majority of Filipinos, and definitely not a third, are still poor. SWS also has statistics on hunger and the figure for February 2007 is 19 percent. This is the proportion of families who answered yes to the question of whether or not they felt hungry at one time or another and had nothing to eat in the last three months.
And are we independent from abuse? The abuse of power, to be exact, like graft and corruption, vote-buying and -rigging, and political dynasties? We have a President who has been accused many times over of being corrupt such as receiving massive kickbacks from the national broadband network agreement with China as well as the Northrail and the Mt. Diwalwal projects. She was also allegedly involved in the fertilizer fund scam as well as the swine scam under the Rural Credit Guarantee Corp. She is even said to give bribes to members of the House to sway them to be at Malacañang’s beck and call.
It is not just the President herself but almost everybody else in our government who arguably takes much more than what they promised to give. Every year, each congressman receives an average of P70 million as pork barrel and each senator, P200 million. I am no mathematician but if they gave a million pesos each to the 53.1 million Filipinos who are “unofficially” poor, then there would be no more poverty (and hunger) in the Philippines. They would also still have a lot of money left to finance projects for themselves and their families, I mean, their constituents. They most probably wouldn’t have to pay for votes anymore in the upcoming elections because the people no longer need the money, but they might have to spend some of it instead on manipulating the election results to their advantage.
With regard to our elections next year, how many more wives of incumbents will run for mayor or governor? Siblings for senator? And children of past and present presidents (and congressmen) for congressman? Yes, our country is a democracy and anyone has the right to enter the realm of politics. But democracy also means the voice of the people so the more people from different families are represented, the louder their voice, and the greater chances of everybody being heard. As they say, “Give chance to others.” So public service or, more appropriately and apparently in the Philippines, power need not be a family affair.
Despite the aforementioned, my kababata (and I) is still hopeful about the Philippines. He believes that we are still a young nation so we have a long way to go. Historically speaking, the Spanish colonized us in 1565 and it took us more than three centuries to be independent from Spain. I just hope that it won’t take that long for our country to be independent from America, poverty, hunger, and the abuse of power. And when that time comes (hopefully in my lifetime), I will always remember this day of independence and have plenty of reasons to celebrate it.
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